#now realizing that means wild has been with me for like. an entire decade now? thats crazy

[wildstorm312]

before wild was my fursona, they were a warriors oc! heres a warriors-ified version of their current design!!

[jseobsky]

That spot will be mine.

Pairing ! bf!Seeun x gn!Reader Synopsis ! Seeun was tired of you having photocards of every idol but him on your phone, now that he was debuting he made it his mission to get you his own photocard. However, when you finally open the album, you don't pull him. Genre ! So fluff I can't, romance Warnings ! swearing, kissing, not proof-read, my humour- Wc ! 1.3k a/n ! Totally not based bcs today I finally bought the album and got Junmin while I was manifesting Seeun- HOWEVER JUNMIN LOOKED SAUR CUTE ON THE PHOTOCARD I CAN'T

Main masterlist !

After knowing my boyfriend was finally going to debut I had one thing in mind and one thing only: Collect his group’s photocards. Until now, I haven’t really collected any photocards even while having around 20 albums myself. I just kinda kept them in their album boxes and the usual one photocard that I kept in the back of my phone case. Seeun wasn’t thrilled about this, he took my photocard choices very seriously, telling me I should keep them in a safer manner or that I could not by any means in the entire world take my Enhypen’s Niki photocard everywhere I went. 

While he was still a trainee it seemed like he also had one goal in mind: Gain my phone case photocard spot. He tried to gift me Polaroids that he took and make me save them on my phone case. At first, I did have them on my phone, but after seeing an idea on Pinterest I couldn’t help myself; All the Polaroids went on the now giant pictures wall. He then started to hate Pinterest. Sure he said all those things jokingly, he knew how much I loved kpop and how much that wall of pictures meant to me. He loved seeing me happy, but he did hate when I got his first album. 

Seeun kept telling me how I could not, by any means, buy his album. Talking about how he was going to gift it to me. “You’re going to curse it.” He said. “You always cry about how you never get your biases unless I’m the one who gifted you the album. I’m not taking any chances.” It was hell waiting for it. I had been waiting for years until his debut, and now I had to wait even more until I could get the physical album? Unbelievable. Seeing all those unboxing videos, and all these people having more than one photocard inclusion while I, who wasn’t able to even pre-order because of Seeun, will only have one. I learned to get over it quickly, patience is a virtue… Fuck that. I don’t wanna wait anymore. It’s been years, decades, maybe even centuries since the album came out. I want that album. I need that album. 

What’s worse is that I didn’t realize with Seeun’s debut that he’ll be even busier. Maybe what I actually needed was Seeun, not his album. 

I’m lying around my living room. A kdrama playing on the tv, and the window is open while I feel really cold. Look, someone is lazy, okay? And the kdrama is so interesting as well… An open box of snacks next to me that I slowly reach out to, not taking my eyes off the tv. The scene was so intense that it was able to make me ignore the little click of the door until I hear someone shouting. “IT’S HERE!” I slowly turn my head around with my eyes wide open. Who the fuck? A wild Seeun appears. Like literally, ignore the bad pokemon reference, Seeun comes in running with a bag in his right hand and his phone in his left hand, which he’s waving. He has the biggest grin on his face while looking at me. I smiled too. Pausing the show while standing up, running towards Seeun going for a hug. Which I never received. Seeun moved to the window and closed it. “It’s really cold outside, you shouldn’t have your window opened, it’s literally about to rain.” He said. I tilt my head and shrug my shoulders while still smiling. “Meh that’s not important, come here” I ran towards him again, only for him to move to the couch, moving some items to the floor before placing a pizza-shaped box on the table. I glare at him. “Look I got it!! Aren’t you excited?!” Seeun says with, again, a really big smile. I try to contain a smile and jokingly I roll my eyes, turn around, and act petty. “I would be more excited if my boyfriend, who I haven’t seen since February, would hug me.” I try to look at him for a bit, and seeing that he now has a smirk on his face I turn my head around again. “Oh really?” He said teasingly. I turn around with a blank face. “No.” We stay looking at each other for some seconds before I start smiling again. I run to the side of the sofa he is sitting on and I jump on top of him. “I’ve missed you so much,” I say while hugging him tightly. He moves my head from being buried in his neck to being in front of him. His expression mirrors mines, a big, BIG smile, and eyes with adoration filled in them. He squishes my face. “I missed you too, so much” Seeun turns his face to look at the box on the table behind me. He sits me on his lap as he sits up, leans forward with a hand on my back to not make me fall, and grabs the box off the table. 

“I got you this,” He says, “hope you like it” I shake my hands and grab the box out of his hands. “I’m just saying, with my luck you’ll get my photocard so enjoy. I did one on this version with that pose you showed me. I’m manifesting specifically that one for you.” Seeun looks at me proudly. I nod fast and start to rip off the plastic that wraps the album. Seeun laughs softly at my poor attempt to rip the plastic off. “Look,” I start saying, “these things are made by the devil himself, don’t laugh at my poor persona because I can’t open the album” I stop my attempt while glaring at him. “Also, I’ve seen you trying to open albums before, and you aren’t a god at opening albums yourself” Finally being able to open the album I grab the most important part of the album. The cd. I’m joking, I grab the inclusions knowing that the part that Seeun mostly wanted to see. I rip one side of the envelope the inclusions were in and slowly turn my head to look at my boyfriend. Fuck, he has his face way too close. Seeun got closer in anticipation of the grand reveal. He nods encouraging. 

I pull out the postcard first, and I smile. “Look I got the baby!” I laugh, Seeun smiles a bit too. “Could’ve been better but I guess a Yechan postcard isn’t the worse,” He says, “now the most important thing, please” I nod. Seeun gets even closer and places his head on my shoulder. I pull the single photo card, which is turned around. I start talking. “You know, just remember it’s okay if I don’t pull your photocard because at the end of the day I-” “Just look at it” Seeun whines. I turn the photocard around.

I feel Seeun drop his whole weight into the sofa’s back, letting out a sigh. Here we go. “I just don’t get it. Why Minjae, why him? Like. If it was… Okay no. I wouldn’t have been happy with anyone. But still!! Why him??” Seeun fake cried. “I mean,” I start talking. “You’re right, you do always pull my biases” Seeun stopped his actions and looked at me with a dead face. He then went to push me off. “Okay no, no, no, wait, no, I’m sorry, I’m joking! You’re my only one!” I laugh, and he stops trying to push me off and goes back to pouting. I lay fully on top of him. I start kissing his face. “I. Promise. You. Are. My. Bias.” He smiles. “Also, I bought an album the other day and I pulled you” I showed him the back of my phone, where a big smiling Seeun was looking back at him. He dropped his mouth and looked at me. “I couldn’t contain myself I’m sorry-” Seeun kissed me. 

[yannig]

So. I've finished binge-watching Pit Babe.

and I have opinions. (yes I am aware it came out like a year ago. who cares) so, with very little order :

Tony died!! Yeah!! ngl, at one point I hoped Babe's father would come in to kill him, but Kenta doing it is even more satisfying so i'm happy with it. also those knife sounds were great. 10/10 no notes.

Babe's father was very obvious as Babe's father the second we met him. it's not necessarily a problem, i just found it funny that they were trying to create a mystery around him.

i didn't know it was an omegaverse when i began watching the show, but it was a pretty sanitized omegaverse, all things considered. no mentions of heat/rut, knotting, mate, pack, mating bite, bond, nesting. the mpreg was only implied. the word omega was uttered exactly once. beyond Tony wanting only alpha kids (with no explanation of what an alpha is), the plot to get a child from Babe, and Babe's fixation on his partner's smell (and most likely, Babe and Charlie's fixation on each other's neck), i often forgot it was an omegaverse. i understand not wanting to scare newbies, omegaverse can be wild, but i was surprised with how little we got of the common tropes. its not a flaw, i was just surprised.

Sonic needs to tell North he loves him. the guy is clearly ready to die for you. just because he's too stupid to realize he's in love with you doesn't mean he isn't.

also this two idiots were still in the building!! i thought they got the USB and then got out to publish the videos! but no! these two idiots were still in the building! thank fuck Kim was close by!!! (he was probably there on purpose, yes, but still. they should have gotten out!)

Way stays a walking red flag until his very last breath and I hate that for him. don't get me wrong, I saw his death coming. he was unredeemable, and we don't want the audience to hate him, so of course he was gonna die. i really don't like this trope, I'd rather he left Babe and X-Hunter behind and got a new chance with Pete, who was clearly ready to give him one and also who he hadn't betrayed and hurt in the worst way possible. but no, that's not how the trope works. he dies. because we don't know how to redeem characters without killing them. and to make the matter worst, he dies having one of his most fucked up interactions with Babe yet, and that's saying something considering his track record, confessing his love for the nth time which was understandable but already awkward on its own, and then asking if Babe ever loved him back when he has made very clear several times that he saw Way as his closest friend and nothing else, begging for forgiveness for trying to rape Babe, i swear to god!! the correct thing to say at this point was "i'm sorry i ever hurt you, i hope you get to be happy with Charlie, don't blame yourself for my death". instead, he gave him enough therapy material for the next decade! with one conversation! how the fuck is Babe supposed to grieve Way, or make peace with anything he has done to him, after that kind of last breath!

(seriously, i probably have enough to say about Way to write an entire essay. the man was fucked up)

Kim has now been officially adopted in the family, he's even invited to the funerals! (i am aware he was still Tony's prisoner during Charlie's funeral, i just found it funny.) we did not see enough of Kim after Tony imprisoned him btw. he is one of my favorite characters in this show and he deserved more screen time!

Did Charlie stole a power that just- teleport him to Babe when he's in danger? this is a least the second time he just appeared out of nowhere to save Babe with no explanation, and with a perfect timing at that.

Babe deserved to scream at Charlie for faking his death. Or a least have a breakdown the like of the one he had with his father. The reunion scene was great and emotional and shit, and it was adequate for the context, but i needed them to have a real conversation about it later. will look for fanfics on the matter.

my man Babe is gonna have so many trust issues it's not even funny anymore. like mate. both his fathers betrayed him (and sold him, though for different reasons), his best friend of 10 years betrayed him in one of the worst way possible, one of his other teammates betrayed him, and his boyfriend has been lying to him the entire time the have known each other, to the point of faking his death without telling him he was alive. listen, i was berating him every time he pushed Charlie away at the slightest sign of dishonesty because I don't like that trope, but I think in this case he was justified. it's going to be fun to get him to trust anyone ever again!

also that man can cry! and make me cry with him at that! like, i knew Charlie's death was a fake out, and i knew it was coming, but episode 10 still got me in tears because Babe's grief was fucking real. giving him his senses back just for him to hear his lover flat-line on the operation table was incredibly cruel. also "He's still warm. Maybe he's not dead yet". are you trying to kill me? also also : did he say "i love you" for the first time at Charlie's grave? because i think he did.

overall, pretty good execution of the fake death trope, they gave us time to feel the grief before revealing he was alive, it worked. (did the plot around said fake death make sense? not... quite? but the feels were there and that's what matters)

Jeff is my baby and i love him. he got a lover and a support system and that's great, though they could do with better communication and still have shit to learn about respecting boundaries. which is saying something because Jeff tends to be pretty fucking clear about his boundaries. i'm watching you Alan. also i've decided he's autistic. for obvious reasons.

the whole "papa and mama" thing Babe and Charlie have going on is not my thing, but it is particularly weird in a context where the last two men Babe called "Papa" betrayed him and hurt him terribly. i get that what they have going on is different, like it's not a daddy kink (which would have been even weirder), but it still left a weird taste in my mouth. i just - i don't know what to make of it. i don't think they got the implication of it when making the show?

Babe and Charlie both need therapy to a desperate level, and i do not trust any of them to try to get it on their own. let's hope the rest of the family team manages to get them there. i'm mostly counting on Jeff to start the movement on this one. and then the others can nicely bully them into getting professional help.

[tonguetiedraven]

surprise yukishima engagement?

I wasn't sure which party you wanted to be surprised, so I went with the first idea that popped in my head. I hope you enjoy! <3

— — — — — —

Renzou’s first response is a laugh, because how could it not be? 

“I—that—I didn’t meant to say that.” Yukio stutters, teal eyes going huge as he gropes for words. That’s when Renzou’s laugh kind of trails off and his own eyes go a bit wide.

“You mean you don’t want to marry me?” He teases, mostly because teasing is his default and the rest of his mind is too busy trying to make sense of what Yukio’s words mean if they’re not a big joke. 

Not that it makes sense even as a joke. This isn’t the first time they’ve watched a ship explode together, isn’t even the first time it’s a ship they caused to explode. (Though he thinks it might be the first one that was for True Cross and not the Illuminati. It’s fun when things change.) But usually they joke about the mission, tease each other for their mistakes, and plan on someplace to eat. Yukio will goad him into doing his paper work, Renzou will shove most of it off on him, and they’ll eat entirely too much before Renzou will pass out on Yukio’s sofa (or bed, if he can swing it.)

This doesn’t fit their usual flow at all.

“I-er, no. Yes. That’s not— I mean to say—” Yukio’s ears join his cheeks in going a dark red. Yukio doesn’t blush often, but when he does, his entire face gets involved. Renzou has found it adorable from the first moment he saw it. (That had been the highlight of the entire training camp. Not that there was a lot of competition there. Ugh. Far too many bugs, and the wrong kind of drama.)

But blush aside, Yukio isn’t exactly taking back his words. His marriage proposal words. His marriage proposal words to Renzou. Who has mostly thought Yukio likes him, and has been teasing the cute boy in hopes of eventually getting a date. Afterall, it’s been nearly a decade since Yukio took his hand to climb into a helicopter (one they didn’t actually explode) and everything about their tentative relationship had changed.) Renzou can read signs, even if Yukio is damn subtle in every sign he’s ever given, and the signs had all said interested in you. He’s entirely open to that, honestly can’t imagine ever doing better than Yukio (and has mostly thought he wouldn’t even get that because this boy is entirely out of his league even if he’d never say that out loud.)

But an engagement hasn’t really crossed Renzou’s mind.

Yukio is still stuttering, and that more than anything makes Renzou realize that Yukio is serious. Or had been. Yukio might not have meant to ask Renzou to marry him, but he wants to. Yukio means the words.

“Holy shit,” Renzou breathes as another blast goes off on the ship they’re watching and it starts to fall through the sky. They're far enough away that they don’t have to worry about being caught in any kind of damage, and usually Renzou enjoys the show (explosions are pretty), but now he doesn’t even see it happening. He just sees freckle and mole covered cheeks turning a darker and darker pink and gapes.

Yukio’s teal eyes aren’t looking at him now. Now Yukio is frantically scanning the falling ship and the abandoned mountain like either will offer him an escape.

Yukio hasn’t run from his problem in ages.

“You’re serious,” Renzou adds, because his brain is still muddling through all of this. 

“I—” and Renzou sees the snap. He watches as Yukio straightens to his full (and once daunting) height and steels with resolve. Yukio’s resolve is usually unbreakable and either annoys Renzou or makes him feel alive. He isn’t sure which end he’s on right now. Not when this ridiculous, brave, determined, studios, kind, attractive, wild boy has just asked him to marry him and is getting that determination here and now in the wake of that.

Because the thing about Yukio is that he doesn’t make decisions on a whim. He thinks everything through — even the things he really shouldn’t, like which topping to get on a sandwich — and when he does make a decision, he sticks with it come what may. It takes a lot to make him change his mind, and it takes a lot to even make him act.

Renzou’s good at both, and apparently he has done this and didn’t know it.

“Yes,” Yukio says, and Renzou feels like the entire mountain rocks under his feet. It doesn’t, at least not yet. The airship is still falling and that’ll make a hell of a thump when it does. But Yukio doesn’t wait for it to crash. He doesn’t like giving excuses. If Renzou’s world feels like it’s rocking, Yukio wants it to be clear it’s because of him.

Asshole.

(Renzou kind of always adores that about him.)

“Yes I was. Am. I hadn’t intended to say it, not that way, but I do mean it. I think I’d very much like to marry you.”

“You know,” Renzou says, because holy shit, this boy was serious, “most people start by asking for a date.” His voice is higher than he wants it, and he’s pretty sure the dizzy feeling is because his heart is racing.

“Yes, well,” Yukio adjusts his glasses and that’s an old tell. Renzou hasn’t seen that since they graduated. Since Yukio got past most of that self-loathing (shit Renzou had seen but never done anything about because even if he would never admit it, he had been scared. He wishes he had been braver and done something, anything, to help. Yukio shouldn’t have spent even a day with that weight and he wishes, wishes, wishes, he’d helped in some way, even if it did work out), since Yukio had gotten past that and healed so many of the deep cracks in himself.

They left scars, even if they healed over, and Renzou can kind of see them now. See them in the way Yukio is standing straight, watching the sun set and the place where the ship crashed (how had Renzou not felt it? Then again, the earth hasn’t been steady since Yukio asked) and not Renzou. He’s already laid his heart out, hasn’t he? He’s shown his heart and despite how easily Renzou can step on it right now, Yukio trusts that he won’t. Yukio, despite the obvious scars and wounds, still trusts, and he’s doing it with I’m-a-spy-Renzou.

“Well, I think most people aren’t in quite such dangerous jobs.” And now Yukio does look at him, and Renzou isn’t ready, and it’s strange to feel his heart physically jump in his chest at the sudden contact. 

“I mean it, Renzou,” and Yukio reaches across the space between them and brushes his thumb over Renzou’s cheek while his long fingers easily curl around his jaw. There’s a slight sting, and Renzou realizes he’d gotten cut during that last fight. Yukio’s probably cleaning some of the blood. He does that a lot. Just not like this. Not with slightly chilly fingers (Renzou wants to warm them and has for so long. It’s weird, but then again, maybe not.) and not with that gentle affectionate look in Yukio’s eyes that is more familiar than he expected.

“Surely you know,” Yukio adds, stepping closer and drawing their heads together easily, because Renzou is entirely pliant in his shock and the world still doesn’t feel quite steady because how? “How much I care for you? That I love you? And have for quite some time?”

“Yeah?” Renzou squeaks —squeaks! — and grabs hold of Yukio’s arms. Not to push him away, not to pull him closer, kind of just to hold because he feels like he could fall and they are on a mountain.

“Yes.” Yukio’s eyes don’t close, but they kind of flutter a little like they want to. The weight of his head against Renzou’s is nice, just a small pressure. Something to kind of anchor, like Yukio’s hand wasn’t enough for that. It’s his left hand. The hand he’d have a ring on. Would it be cool against his cheek? Cooler than Yukio’s fingers? Or—no, knowing Yukio and his (endearing) practicality, it’d be silicone and would just be slightly smooth. 

What does it mean that he’s thinking that? That it makes his heart feel like it’s twisting and flaring in his chest?

“I—” and now it’s Renzou stuttering as he tries to understand. “I—”

“Shh,” Yukio’s eyes do close and his hand falls from Renzou’s cheek to hold onto his upper arm. “No. It was wrong of me to spring it on you like that. You don’t have to—”

And that is what does it. 

Renzou doesn’t get a lot of choices in his life. He’s been bossed around since he was born, ordered to be this and do that, and he hates all of that. Hates being cornered and made to do things, and hates when people just make assumptions about what he will or won’t do.

Yukio has also been forced into a lot of roles in his life, and Yukio also hates it. Yukio also has people bossing him, and very few choices that are his to make.

Yukio had made an offer, and Yukio wants an answer, but Yukio is giving him a choice. Yukio isn’t pushing. In fact, Yukio is trying to take back the question because it comes off as pushing, and that? That weirdly pushes Renzou.

To hell with it. They’re on a mountain, they exploded a ship, they’ve got miles to hike to get back, and they’re going to spend at least half of it kissing if Renzou’s got anything to say about it. He’s had dreams about those lips, dreams about those hands on him, and now… well, might as well embrace the impulsive streak that got him up here to watch (miss) the explosion.

“Why not?” Renzou asks, laughs, “Sounds like fun.”

Yukio’s eyes spring back open. “What?”

Renzou shrugs and grins because it’ll always be fun to make Yukio wrong footed and now… Now there are so many possibilities and he can’t even imagine them all.  

“I’ll expect a ring, of course,” he adds, grinning wider and wider as a look of shocked wonder takes over Yukio’s handsome and familiar face. “Something expensive. And you know, a few dates.” 

There’s a pause. Yukio’s eyes aren’t quite so wide, but they’re just as delighted, wrinkling a little at the corners. “I’m free tonight.”

“What a coincidence, so am I.” Renzou steps back, breaks the connection of their heads and reaches for Yukio’s hand instead. Yukio lets him have it. Looks down at it in a kind of quiet wonder even as his chilled fingers curl around Renzou’s too warm ones.

“And obviously,” he continues, as they start on the long trek down the mountain, “we’re not getting married in Kyoto.”

“God no.”

Renzou laughs again, hand in hand with his fiance—holy hell—and wonders who they should tell first. He imagines the shock on his family’s faces, the glee on Rin’s, the confused acceptance from Konekomaru and Ryuuji, and he grins all the wider. 

“I can’t wait to start planning the honeymoon.” He lets his eyes drag over Yukio, earning a full face blush and a stuttered Renzou! that has him laughing until Yukio grabs him by the shoulders and hauls him into a kiss just to shut him up.

Renzou has no complaints, and is pretty sure he won’t for a long while.

[faelapis]

"the owl house" thoughts - s2 finale

i'm just gonna bulletpoint here. starting with things i liked:

obviously, i like that the collector ended up being someone with their own motivations rather than just like a xD quirky ex machina

i like that hunter wasn't able to fight belos, even when it counted. so often you see the """satisfying""" thing where an abuse victim just snaps and decks their abuser in the face without fear. i'm sure hunter is mad deep down... but i like that it's something he's not able to channel, due to other emotions like fear being paramount here. perhaps even lingering love.

in fact, IF hunter stays this way... i, resident hunter disliker, may even grow to like him. i just assumed, TOH being somewhat predictable, he was gonna have the classic arc of realizing he's been lied to and then Beating Up His Abuser. i want him to stay more conflicted. more gentle.

i like that they played into belos as someone who wants to save humanity with more sincerity. that felt very fake and cheap before, it was more substantial here. it was like he almost had a real motivation!! rather than being just an Evil Liar who Lies!!!

as much as i didn't like how refusing to free the collector was another instance of belos being, well, an Evil Liar who Lies, in hindsight, it does make sense. this kids a powerful lil fucker.

i also like that this means we have a "villain" who is not an authoritarian, but an anarchist agent of chaos. wild magic, even. sure, i don't think the collector will really be a villain, more an unpredictable force of nature who may actually just be having a tea party with king right now. but still. duality! nuance! yay!

I LIKE BELOS WEARING HIS HUMAN DRIP FUCK YOU LUZ

also huge fan that the belos goo attached to hunter and came with to the human realm :D i'm sure this means only good things :D ok but unironically i would like a redemption arc ("we need your help to save humanity") that only i will enjoy, while every egg on twitter complains about it being unearned or rushed.

WE GOT A TITLE DROP!!!!! THE COLLECTOR IS CREATING AN OWL HOUSE (TM) THAT MATTERS TO THE STORY?

things i disliked:

the aforementioned "you lied to me!" betrayal between belos and the collector. i feel like every poorly-written villain has to do because they're the villain. they're an asshole to people around them not because it furthers their goals, but just to make sure the audience knows they're an asshole.

same thing with kikimora.

in the collectors case, like i said, not entirely unwarranted... but it does seem like an instance where belos is just big mad that he cant control them. its not like he's doing it for the boiling isles' sake. its just him him him.

wow they really just had belos try to kill everyone (even his followers, some of which he's known for decades, if not centuries!) just to once again show that he's the bad guy.

okay. so. this is a big one - in a show for kids, you know the protagonists will survive. that's not a bad thing! but it does mean you NEED emotional stakes that aren't rooted in whether people will live. and almost everything "emotional" this episode is a fakeout about someone dying.

strongly trying to resist urge to contrast it to SU "change your mind", where steven's entire identity as himself, as someone separate from his mother, hangs in the balance.

raeda suffers the most from this. like 50% of their relationship is already someone lying or tricking the other To Protect Them (tm), which i already don't love... but to ALSO have their main emotional thread in the s2 finale be a fakeout sacrifice is not great. we know raine isn't gonna die, we know eda isn't gonna die. this is a real relationship with emotional complexity, but they can't steer it in any other direction than angsty fake sacrifices.

oh eda got out of the coven system REAL easy. just remove the arm, i guess. that's dumb. i wish she had stuck with it. could've prompted some soul-searching now that the new threat (the collector) is the embodiment of wild, unhinged magic.

other general thoughts:

look. i know belos tentative truce with the heroes is extremely unlikely, but i feel like even people who want him to just be a villain have to be somewhat charmed with the idea of grumpy ghost goo following the gang around, commenting on how stupid their plans are, how he should be the leader, etc.

on that note, luz actually keeping her promise and getting belos some modern human clothes would be sick. girls night shopping trip WHEN????? i wanna see him in yeezys.

i'm all on board with king molting theory. make him big.

bring luz' mama to the demon realm somehow. she seems somewhat disillusioned with her own life, yknow?

while i agree that this was a somewhat messy / overstuffed episode, idk, i think that lends it an advantage in that it can't just wrap everything up with a neat little bow. i think that lack of time might even benefit the show in s3 somewhat, because they might have to keep some things open-ended. which i like :)

aaaand that's all! see you in season 3.

[topazadine]

So you know how you don't really think about something until someone mentions it and then--Bam--it's kinda everywhere? I don't mean this in a negative way though it likely could receive scrutiny, but I never realized their was an entire anti vs pro shipper culture/foodwar going on??? If I liked something I shipped it, if I didn't then I just moved on and never bashed people for their preferences. I never had anyone ever attack or try in the slightest to create confrontation for my likes on fanfic platforms. I'm just kinda puzzled over my blindness? Though maybe it's simply in my personal nature to just like what I like and find nerdy joy and friendship in those I run across that happen to align to my interests.

So this isn't so much an 'ask' as it is my own personal thoughts and newfound observations. The only time I ever would find myself having to stand my ground is if someone was blatantly trying to shove their opinions down my throat in their selfish and harmful attempts to force me to agree.

Hopefully that never happens, but I would find myself defending someone who was experiencing that sort of ugly harassment. People have their right to opinions and as long as they aren't trying to harm (mental and/or physically), harrass, or gods forbid attempt the kill someone over their ideas whether by their own hand or by bullying means that cause a person to kill themselves, then people can express their opinion.

Like ffs it's like a kid playing with dolls, keeping to themselves in a corner, suddenly being ganged up on for no reason other than for said gang to be ugly. There is nothing threatening that rat pack except perhaps their own insecurities and the unfortunate coaching they've had in their own upbringing from parents that were also taught to snuff out what doesn't fit their own agendas

It's completely immature and a horrifying reflection on a deeper cultural issue that creates its own monsters and encourages violent retaliation over civil discussion.

Yeah, I agree 100%. I've been in fandom since I was an early teen, so like ... god, almost two decades now ... and I have seen some very interesting and fucked up stuff, like incestuous real person fic that has one (real life) participant die of a heroin overdose. This was back in the days of FF.net, which was a Wild West when it came to fic: you just had no idea what you were going to run into.

If I didn't like it, I just went "whoa, yikes" and clicked out, because who am I to say what other people should enjoy? Different strokes for different folks - that's how we should all live our lives.

I sort of wonder whether the whole antiship movement comes from the rampant book bannings across the US; children are seeing their parents demanding they not view or read certain things and extrapolating that to their own fan experience. "I don't want to read this, so no one should" is a very creepy and authoritarian mindset, and one I find quite dangerous.

But, I also think that the antiship movement is an ourobouros that will eventually eat itself as people create more and more restrictive definitions of what is "good" and "non-problematic." So I don't worry too much about it and just block people who annoy me, like I do with everything. Life's too short to let strangers make me mad.

[frogsandfries]

Oh-kaayyyy

So there's a semi-annual inspection on my weekend. Is this legal? I'm not on section eight..... Anyway, I figured it wouldn't entirely kill me to clean up a bit now and I can do some more--like beginning to vacuum--over the next couple days. Like, no way in hell am I taking my recyclables out. I just put on my slipper socks; it's dark outside and it was cold earlier when I was returning my stupid fucking router.

Plus, my place never gets like......hoarder gross, just like, this person lives here and has ferrets for cats.

Anyway, I finally, finally got the goddamn stupid fucking router to work. So I finally downloaded the blogs I would most be sad to lose.

Uuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmm

I didn't realize that basically, it tears the blogs apart and then if you want them put together, like in a book I would imagine......... you have to manually find a way to put that shit back together. Also, a blog as big as frogsandfries presently is (22,156 before this post)............at least on this laptop, isn't downloading nicely.....and also, would be someone's life's work to reconstruct. Sooooooooooo that's fun. Imagine you could cram an average of just like, 1.5 posts per page......I'm imagining a 5x8 book, because that's like, a normal book size.....a book of just this blog would be gargantuan. Or just a ridiculous number of volumes.

Also, does anyone else just think about the.....just overwhelming quantities of information they've created? Like, here I am undertaking turning someone else's life's work--thousands of pages of handwriting and typewriting--and not even thinking about the mountains of Me that I'm leaving behind. I mean, there are the books that I'm binding, preserving parts of the internet archive of fanfiction; stories that people wrote, openly admitting that they were inspired by someone else. And then there are the gigabytes of just photos that saved to my google cloud (not counting all the pictures I either lost or got posted to a blog and have been buried). I've already planned to put all my pictures from google into photo books. I've already planned to print them on some kind of glossy paper.

And this is just information from the past ten or so years.

What about moving forward? I have at least another three to five decades of life expectancy, and I don't see myself being any less generative. I'm still going to keep screenshotting wild things I find on the internet, I'm still going to keep gathering studies and references. Honestly, a book of just things that inspire me or that I would stick to a pinboard so that I can see them would probably be a whole book. My cats will probably get their own book. I'm going to keep logging and showing off the things that I create. I'm going to occasionally need to journal my thoughts.

I'm just trying to picture all of these honestly, what should be impossible amounts of information that we all produce on a daily basis. And for better or for worse, one day, the sands of time will just.....wipe it away. The first to vanish will be the things that were never preserved offline. And who am I, really, to cling to an opportunity for some form of immortality? I mean, apart from a person who is having these.....big, tiny, existential thoughts.

Anyway. I kinda started to do a 'strangers in my home' clean on my apartment. I never did end up finishing those 'colors of the sky' notebooks........ I have so many big projects..... I want to finally, one, crack the Darger texts and turn it into something that is.....what's the word that I'm looking for here.... I intend to probably post it to something like AO3 and maybe even post it to like, Amazon or some other PoD site for people to request at their leisure. I want to make it something accessible and malleable. Like, you definitely could download it totally for free yourself off of AO3, and print it on the paper of your choosing--or you can go the convenience route. Not that I even remotely expect any kind of notoriety for doing this. I'm just doing it because it calls to me.

Maybe then I can finally turn my attention to archiving and preserving my internet existence.

I put up those lights I've been mumbling about. I was having an issue with my internet which is really the only reason I left my home instead of being at work. My phone is dead rn, but it's really cool. It was gloomy today, but this strip of lights lights up the space like daylight. I really can't get over it and I'm so eager to buy probably my final set of lights for over the couch.

I'm also thinking about purchasing more jars, maybe in a few different sizes, for these fairy lights, and probably finding a way to pin a few jars of lights to the wall, for a bit of ambient lighting.

Also, I think this is my last random rambly thought, but if you have the patience, apparently you can just kinda one-fell-swoop download all your photos off your google cloud???? I probably won't do this unless I can muster enough self-control to save for a hard-drive because......can you even imagine downloading that much information all at once??

I really ought to at least pick at that project once in a while.

[deerydear]

Taking a trip down from the mellow 'feel' of this blog that I like to maintain, to point out something which is entirely unnecessary, but which has bothered me the entire time I've been on fucking tumblr.

This is incredibly disturbing, and not in a fun way.

The fucked up thing about some people is that they'll say shit like this:

THAT'S NOT "PROBABLY"! THAT IS! STOP ACTING LIKE IT'S FUCKING NORMAL!

I KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE FUCKED UP, BUT IT'S FUCKING CONTAGIOUS! STOP IT YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER! STOP HURTING YOURSELF! STOP DOWNPLAYING IT! STOP!

basically I see the internet like some carnival freakshow where its normal for peopel to be maimed and raped, and to myself I think "what fucking world do you live in that you need to gently plead and prod people to believe you? stop metaphorically sucking these people's dicks! Grow a fucking spine. Grow a goddamn spine."

That's what I hate about tumblr, because then these people get mad if you aren't down in the dirt with them.

They call it 'privilege' instead of realizing maybe they shouldn't have to live like that either? maybe no one should? Maybe suffering should not be idolized! Look, I'm talking like them, now.

That's what a decade of soaking up this horseshit does. Avoid anything that makes your hair prick up like this.

There is a magnetic polarity. You can either allow the more positive people to pull you up with them, or you can try to drag them down into the negative up-side down world you were forced into. I spent years dragging people down, and looking like some kind of wild-eyed hellion.

I literally used to wish over and over, feeling the power coursing through my veins like magma, I'd chant "I WISH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WOULD DIE!"

ignore the.... temporality.

Then, a few months later, covid started.

The one thing I hate so much about low self-esteem is that it can be contagious. I've taught other people how to hate themselves. I've seen it. I regret.

The worst thing is that when someone is within that mind-space, they don't see it as self-hatred.... they start seeing it instead as 'just the way the world should work (or does work, or whatever..... but it's all wishful thinking built on top of a Lie.) When someone like this encounters something which doesn't reinforce this negative self-image that they have, then they get angry at it... for not denigrating them! Because they want to believe this is the way the world works, and every time reality breaks through, they wanna smear the camera lense with shit so the light won't come in anymore.

I think the really destructive thing that enables this cycle to keep going is that the afflicted person keeps telling themself, "oh, but I do wanna get better…. but I'll only accept the apology if it happens in this one specific way that I've (for-some-reason) decided that I need it to happen like."

As soon as you say you won't get over something, you give up your own control. Everyone else still has their own control, but you don't. Grow a fucking pair!

I'm so mean because I'm talking to the teenage-me who fell into this black-fucking-abyss once it appeared on my computer screen in the form of tumblr.com, because "oh the computer people must be cool! I bet they're not losers like all the podunks around me!" BUT THEY ARE. YOU ARE! FUCK YOU!

and yes, I knew this. that's the sad thing. I was just fucking power-hungry.

THE ONE EYED MAN IS KING AMONGST THE BLIND!

oh really?

WHAT IF THEY ALL THINK HE'S JUST FUCKING INSANE?

then again, this is all confirmation bias, because I gravitated more often towards these kinds of negative nelly loser sad shitheads who hate everything…. I don't even know, man.

Like I'd just stroll right past anyone who was saccharine like, "yeah fucking right."

and walk right up to the people who are bleeding on the inside. and sit down…. even though, honestly, to tell the truth and break my 'hard' exterior, I had a gut feeling that it was a bad idea. BUT I'M HARD!

lol

[fragileoracle]

She Is Anew, She is Reclaimed; Conceptualizing The Verdant Frontier

"Recently I had made up my mind to participate in NaNoWriMo."

Of course we (writers I mean) are mostly knowledgeable of what the event means-- hours upon hours of staring at a laptop screen, willing a full novel into existence by hammering our eager fingertips across a keyboard, unless, of course, you're one of those (that I admire deeply) that prefer the pen to the sword. This time spent not including what should be hours of editing and re-editing and weeping openly into a cold cup of coffee as you realize what a ridiculous idea it was to begin with.

All in the span of a single month. Yes. The hopeful author's inktober.

Fast-forward exactly two weeks. It is 6 am on a Monday, (I actually had to look at the date to make sure) I am sitting at my desk at work patiently waiting for 7 am to turn around so I can return home to my cat (he's going to be pissed that he hasn't gotten fed yet). Having just created this Tumblr after being away for the better part of a decade, and my mind is reeling with the at-times overwhelming buzz of characters and story-lines I am itching to actually write.

It hits me.

I will not be finishing anything in time for the conclusion of NaNoWriMo, to ask that of myself when I haven't been consistenly writing is beyond my abilites both innate and honed. Yet in the same vein of thinking? I am entirely grateful to the sudden spur of the moment decision to write something. It is not the project I would have originally picked to work on, but here I am. Planning. Outlining. Staring at the blinking cursor on my screen. I am for once in a thousand moons actually writing again. This is a project that is all mine, and I rely on no co-authors or partners to aid me in the task of world-building or even small details like naming places or people.

A daunting task? Obviously.

Who in their right mind after creating four entire universes would choose to start from scratch a fifth time? Who would voluntarily leave whole worlds on the back-burner for a possibly over-glorified fan fiction with exactly one character from the franchise and paint an entirely new backdrop for him?

Me.

*cue unhinged laughter*

After a month of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I have been deeply invested in all things cowboys and outlaws, but completely disinterested in the actual history of any real timeline. Boring. I want the wild west to be much more wild, and I want androids and aliens and space travel. I want to drop a reincarnation of Arthur Morgan into the thick of it and spin a different ending (after having my heart ripped out and stomped on). I want to give the characters that haven't had an opportunity to shine in previous projects of mine a complete over-haul.

I want a new frontier, one that has grown over the bones of empires fallen.

The Verdant Frontier

Catchy right?

When conceptualizing the universe I wanted to write in, I knew I wanted to stay true to exactly two themes; overgrown & wild.

Of course there were other elements that I was concerned with but RDR2 had awakened such a thirst for the "Untamed" that I decided to go for the extreme, a method I tend to use in a lot of my world-building.

We all have secret wishes, don't look at me like that.

There's this beautifully bittersweet theme of losing a world that once felt vast and magical i.e the final frontier of America toward the turn of the 20th century. RDR2 is drenched with longing for a piece of the world that remains untouched, a corner of the world to hide in after a lifetime of surviving; a subject that I became very enmeshed with. I felt deeply sympathetic toward those that wanted to simply fade to black when resistance of the suffocating grip of c i v i l i z a t i o n inevitably became futile. Decades of theft from the ones that had lived on this land for lifetimes leading up to Industry on the cusp of taking over completely as capitalism slowly sinks its teeth into the new world. Not to mention the world now is a much more extreme version of this sentiment, I too yearn for the quiet corners of the world where light pollution doesn't exist and the smog of cities is little more than a bad memory.

Its a piercing kind of yearning.

*cracks knuckles*

So of course as many creators before and after me... that means its time to force a cure for such yearning into existence.

Eventually this planet will find its ruin in the same hands that promised accessibility and wealth for all, as climate disaster becomes more and more irreversible. In a way I believe the growth of this idea is a love letter to an Earth that even in its ruin still found a way to progress forward in a quiet, heartbreaking, beautiful way. I suppose there are two deaths that I am not and could never be prepared for.

Arthur Morgan and planet Earth.

A fictional character and the literal planet I live on... ahh, the duality of man.

The very basis of the setting for the Verdant Frontier is a planet that was raped and abandoned by the self-proclaimed "upper-crust" of society. Those dripping in wealth both new and old began their escape from the dying Earth in the year 2100 after space-travel had become readily-possible for more than just organizations like NASA (looking at you b*zos). The event would be called "The Grand Flight" and would mark a time in history. However those without the ability to leave would be left alone to the planet sapped of resources, where weather patterns had turned fatal, and nature itself becoming hostile where once it provided.

I still wonder where exactly I should take said hostile nature. Man-eating plants anyone? Much larger animals perhaps?

Fast-forward exactly one-thousand years to 3100, to be exact year 3115 as our "time of telling". Translation; the time the beginning of the story is told, however this may be debatable depending on who I begin telling the story with. There are six major cities, many townships and villages scattered over the unrecognizable land masses of Earth. Much of what was possible and practicalities in the 1890s of our real history is possible and used during this time, the humans that remained somehow managing to survive after all this time. The buildings, homes, and community centers are quite rustic, a scenery (of course) that would remind one of the facades of the usual fictional frontier imagery.

Population is finally climbing once more among the "Rooted" as they are called, even if life expectancy has been reduced among the denizens of Earth.

However, those that once left often return for a visit. They are called the Unbound and have long since become something beyond human. With life expectancy proving to be beyond 200 years of age, the Unbound have made remarkable advances in health and space-related technology. They have seen the very edges of the cosmos and have traveled further than most species in the far reaches of the macrocosm. Yet still they return to Earth, going so far as to create the first metropolis on Mars known as Marsaven. A neighbor to Earth in all respects.

I imagine for the Unbound its very much like going to Disney World for vacation with family. Similar to Westworld even. Amusement. Only the darker than black quality here is the fact that those on Earth are very real beings. With hopes, dreams, and squishy meat sacks for bodies. Enter moral quandaries here. Earth has become somewhat of a dumping ground for the Unbound, both for criminals ("unrecoverables") and resource-related waste. The more industry that comes to Earth via connections to the Unbound and even alien species beyond them, the more danger follows.

Spacecraft theft, murder, kidnapping, execution, politics, royalty, and COPS. Oh the things I have planned for my Verdant Frontier. So you see, where this may have stemmed from an inkling for a fan fiction and a month of cramming a novel into something readable...

Its become so much more.

Signed,

k.c

[littlemisslipbalm]

“you make me so angry sometimes”

idk if this gif makes sense, but i feel like it will if you read the story, it just gives me that vibe. 

A one shot I cooked up idk, it’s about Harry and a makeup artist on DWD, it’s quite angsty, idk how that happened, it’s also very long, idk how that happened either, maybe i do a part 2, maybe i don’t idk lmk. Feedback is appreciated, not proofread. REBLOGS help writers tremendously and i love reading whatever you write in the tags its my favorite thing!! Love yall and Merry Christmas!

Word Count: 17.7k | Warnings: ENEMIES to LOVERS! swearing, angst!, some anxiety -like self-doubt, yn being mean to harry kind of a lot, i dont remember, nothing too crazy, Nick Kroll?, lots of conversation

-

When she pictured herself as a makeup artist in Los Angeles, she hadn’t pictured exactly what she was doing right now.

She had expected doing gorgeous makeup for gorgeous actresses or doing wildly fun stuff like in Euphoria. And because of that she had worked her ass off to get where she was today. She had practiced for hours, worked countless hours for free, and networked to the cows came fucking home.

So why the fuck was she using tattoo-strength concealer to cover up the maybe 60 tattoos some asshole musician turned actor had all over?

Don’t Worry Darling was her first major film to work on so she couldn’t complain. She was happy to simply be there. Well she had been. The first day she had showed up 15 minutes early and had worn her favorite power suit she had. It was dark navy with a white lace long sleeve turtleneck underneath. She hoped to look fun but professional.

Hollywood was all about impressions, especially first ones, even when you’re the makeup artist. She had quickly learned that she was one of six makeup artists. One of them being the friend who had helped her get the job, Angie. Angie was like her surrogate mother in Los Angeles that she had met on her first film job for something much less high profile than Olivia Wilde’s second directing project. Her braided grey hair and fabulous jeans had drawn Y/N right in and they had connected instantly.

Since Y/N was deemed the most inexperienced by the head of the makeup department, she was relegated to easier jobs: assisting the other artists on main characters sometimes, mostly dealing with minor characters touch ups (and full make-up if she was lucky), and the job nobody wanted: tattoo coverage.

Harry Styles was one of the leads for the film and besides his minimal acting, everyone knew he was a worldwide rockstar. With the rock and roll life starting off as a popstar life at the ripe age of 16, he had amassed around 60 tattoos in the past decade. Impressive by her standard normally. She usually counted herself as an appreciator of tattoos and their art, finding them similar to makeup and the self expression that came with both forms. Especially since she had a few of her own, but when she walked into Trailer #6 and saw a good amount of Harry’s tattoos, she wanted to murder every artist he’d ever been to.

She had to make an inventory the first day of all of his visible tattoos when he was just wearing boxers. He had been friendly, trying to make conversation, but as the time wore on, they both grew tired and silent. She had to write down the location and a description of every tattoo and as he took off everything but boxers she grew more and more annoyed with his random and dumb tattoos. Some of them were amazing, the eagle, the anchor, the butterfly, and the ferns were probably her favorites. But some of them, she couldn't hold back her rolling eyes and annoyed expressions. The “Big” on his right big toe, a miniscule lock, almost everything on his inner left arm (the packers logo, Pingu, etc.)

She traces at the rose and the ship and then flips his arm out to reveal his inner arm to her gaze. “That is a big fucking bee.”

He snickers, “Y’like it?”

She ignores his question. “For god’s sake, someone is needle happy,” she said as she examined his left arm, taking note of every permanent drawing.

He shrugs his right shoulder, uninhibited by her prodding. “Dunno, beginning to regret some of them.”

“I would hope,” she mutters, scribbling on her paper the various ones she had just seen on his arm. Next was his ribcage ones.

He scoffs, “Oi, it’s not like you haven’t got any.”

“How would you-” She looks at him wide eyed.

“Right…” he takes his right hand and pushes her hair past her ear to reveal three little red line butterflies following the curve of her ear, “There. At least.”

She huffs and knocks his hand away from her. Her hair falling back into its place.

“Maybe some located in a few more intimate places I’m guessing from the red rushing to your cheeks right now.”

“Can you just let me do my job,” she says, not giving in to his teasing or sparing him a glance as she feels his intense gaze on her face. She was studying his left rib cage where a few cool tattoos happened to be.

“You at least have some taste or persuasive artists because not all of these are shit,” she speaks again after just the sound of her pen on the paper filled the trailer.

“Gee, thanks,” he laughs unamused and rolls his large green eyes.

She thought he had some of the biggest eyes she’d ever seen. But she also knew to keep that to herself because he’d either take it as a compliment and think she was noticing him too much or he’d take it as a massive insult and get her fired.

His right hand taps at his thigh, tapping a rhythm she didn’t care to pay any attention too. She just wanted to finish the stupid inventory of the stupid tattoos on this stupid man.

“Take those off,” she says to Harry, looking back at her clipboard again, filling up quickly with her notes.

He stands there, staring at her stubbornly. He was entirely bored with this exercise, especially since his company was some of the worst he’s ever had. She spares him a glance when she doesn’t notice any slipping off of the colorful sweatpants he’s wearing.

She arches a brow at him, her pen tapping impatiently against the paper. “Go on. Can’t imagine you want this to go on longer than it already has.”

He rolls his eyes again, slipping his thumbs into the waistline of the pants and tugging down. Simultaneously, he toes off the dirty vans he seemed to wear everywhere. The fabric pools easily and he steps out of them and discards them on the couch behind him. He’s actually wearing black briefs. She chooses not to notice anything further than that.

“Socks...can stay on,” She tries to say as he begins to peel one off. He stops midway and nods.

She flings his shirt to him, not needing to see his naked torso for another moment, “I know you’ve got some feet and ankle tats, but I also know that you won’t be wearing anything that will expose them. Thank your lucky stars that I don’t have to makeup your feet.”

He catches the shirt easily and slips his arms inside before tugging it quickly over his head and over his expansive shoulders. The ferns disappear out of sight.

“Well then we’re almost done then. Just got the knee ones -”

“And the tiger. That’s gonna be one son of a bitch,” she sighs and examines his legs, not bothering to crouch.

“What the actual fuck dude?” Her tone is exasperate and like she would rather be anywhere else than here.

“I’m sorry?” He sputters, hands on his hips and eyes bewildered.

“Yes. No. Oui. Non. Who are you?” She rubs at her eyes and shakers her head.

“S’a little rude.”

“You’re right,” she semi-rushes out at his serious tone, ready to apologize. When a grin spreads over his face and he chuckles under his breath she really wants to smack him upside the head. He was exhausting. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Thought it was funny at the time. Kind of think it’s even funnier now since it’s got you all mad.” He leans over her shoulder to look at her notes and when she glances at him unhappily he just looks smug.

“Alright,” she finishes the scribble of a description and clicks the end of her pen, “All done. You can get dressed. I’ll see you bright and early for tattoo makeup. It’s gonna take about an hour to do all this, just so you can mentally prepare for that.”

“It was nice to meet you,” he attempts at a friendly and professional farewell. “See you tomorrow…” he trails off as he watches her turn on her heel and walk out of the trailer door swiftly. The door swung shut and bounced a little bit in her wake.

Harry sighed and adjusted his clothes and hair in the mirror. After a moment he shakes his head, an even louder sigh escaping him.

-

“Good morning!” She greets happily, walking into the trailer without a knock. Well-rested and happy at least that she doesn’t have to just inspect a body, she looks around the trailer.

She realizes no one is there and she’s taken aback. First of all, if Harry wasn’t there then he shouldn’t have left his trailer unlocked. And second, he was fucking late, the fucking twat.

She grumbles, setting her coffee on the countertop. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “In through the nose, out through the mouth” she mutters. She knew this was a big opportunity and having a big star like Harry in her corner could make her career. She needed them to get off on a better foot today.

“Good form, I’d say relax the shoulders a little more,” the door swings open carrying the California twang-British accent that she would soon become all too accustomed to.

Harry points at her shoulders and narrows his eyes regarding her in the trailer. She offers a strained smile through the mirror and Harry sets down his personal things on the couch.  

“Alright, well let’s get started shall we,” she smiles and turns to him, gesturing to the swivel chair next to her.

He nods, a twinkle in his eye as he regards her. He’s unsure of the tone and attitude she’s giving him today. She had been feisty yesterday, cordial at times, but mostly biting and witty. He had liked it. It had made the whole ordeal bearable whereas now she seemed to be laying it on a little thick.

“Just your hands and neck today,” she says, pulling out the makeup materials needed and a checklist of the tattoos she needed to make sure were invisible.

“Should only take..a little under an hour today. Just gonna remind you now though, other days we won’t be so lucky.”

Harry chuckles under his breath and rolls his head around his shoulders before sitting in the chair. “Were you tired yesterday?” He inquires.

“Why do you ask?” She throws a glance over her shoulder at Harry. He’s begun slipping off his sweatshirt and yawns as he does it.

“You seem different from yesterday and I’m just wondering which one is the real you.”

She continues working about the room and rolls her eyes to herself, “I’m always the real me. I come no other way, but this morning I woke up and thought ‘this is the job you’ve fucking wanted for ages, so stop being such a bitch so you don’t get fired, you prick’.” She pauses and turns to face Harry. “The ‘you prick’ was directed at me, that was still part of my thought,” she adds.

He throws his head back and laughs. Then he nods, still laughing lightly, “I get that. Sometimes I’m just so in my head and yesterday I was just so fuckin’ bored. Sorry if I got on your nerves.”

“Don’t mention it.” She waves her hand at him nonchalantly.  

Then she moves to inspect his hands and notices the lack of rings, unlike yesterday when she had to make him take them off.

“You have amazing cuticles,” she notices and mentions without any pretences. Harry mutters his thanks, pursing his lips as he watches her work.

She stops her inspection and places the clipboard on the countertop in front of them.

“Could you take your necklaces off? I need to cover up half of the swallows and the years, for when you unbutton your shirt a bit.”

He wets his lips and nods, hands going to fiddle with the clasps behind his neck. He slips off one of the necklaces with ease, a yellow eye beaded necklace that he lays gently on the countertop next to the clipboard. Then he takes his cross and pulls it over his head, no clasp needed.

“Could I put some music on?” Harry asks after five minutes of Y/N working in silence and Harry only being able to stare either at himself, her work, or nowhere.

“I can,” she stops her work for a moment, “Can’t have you messing up the makeup before it sets. Otherwise I’d have to kill you.” Harry can’t be sure if she’s joking or not. Therefore, he was intent on not messing it up.

“Any requests?” She stands at the counter now, instead of seated on a stool working on Harry's left hand.

He shrugs, like he hasn’t got the faintest idea about good music. She refrains from rolling her eyes once again because she feels herself in a test. She wets her lips, sifting through different things in her Spotify and then lands on her playlist titled “it’s your song” named after Elton John’s song. It had some other musicians, a mix of Queen, Bowie, and more and she was sure she would pass the test.

She presses shuffle and She’s Always A Woman by Billy Joel begins to play over her laptop. Harry nods pleased and she wants to shake her head at him.

She can’t hold back the scoff though after a moment of going back to finishing his hand.

“What?” His British accent thickens with his annoyance growing.

“Nothing,” she chirps, intently putting the final touches on his wrist.

“Seriously. What?”

She stands and sets down the makeup. “Can you unbutton your shirt?” She made a note to herself that from now on she’d have to have him take his shirt off before setting to work because if his hands got messed up she’d have to start over. Thankfully he was already wearing a button up this morning.

He stares at her, offering no movement, just inquisitively waiting for her to respond to his original question.

She shuts her eyes, taking another deep breath and then bites at her lower lip. “It’s just...you’re so easy to read.” She fears adding anything else and moves towards him with the makeup hoping to encourage him to unbutton his shirt.  

His right hand deftly pulls at the buttons as he regards her. His eyes are intent on her, she can see him clearly calculating her. Her green paisley button up tucked up into the back of her bra leaving a splay of her stomach. The semi-balloon sleeves cinched at the wrists leading to her slightly ringed hands. The oversized blue jeans that have no holes, just a tiny patch right next to the left pocket. The frayed ends of the pants laying over her rather pristine white old skool vans.

The Boxer fades in as she waits for him to finish the unbuttoning of the shirt. He’s still staring at her.

“Am I?” He finally inquires, voice pitched higher like he doesn’t believe her.

She gives him a serious stare and leans over him and adjusts the collar of his shirt. She adds paper towels to avoid makeup on his clothes.  

“Yes!” She laughs, “And you don’t even think so, which is like...of course.”

He hums, tilting his head back as she sets to work on covering up the swallows. He wiggles his hands that now both rest on the arm chairs.

“I don’t see it.”

“Of course you don’t,” she glances at his face, their eyes meeting for a moment. “You’re Harry Styles. Everyone is in love with this image you created for yourself and it has just enough of your true self that people feel like they really know you, but you also maintain the illusion. So you think you’re this mysteriously amazing, not like the rest guy, but you are just like the rest of them. Obsessed with yourself and rich so you’re deemed eccentric rather than crazy for all the extravagant shit you do. So when you want me to play music and don’t offer any suggestions I know exactly what music I need to play for you to like me.”

“I feel like that last part says more about you than it does me,” he quirks a brow at her, straining his neck to look at her face as she continues to work.

She flushes, his response both better and worse than she expected. She had gotten a little carried away in her response and she had no idea why. She truly wasn’t one to go off on people so easily and especially not with someone she hardly knew, but something about Harry had her on edge. She was just thankful he hadn’t gotten mad at her response, instead he took it in stride. Further proving her point that he was extremely smart and did things purposefully and she saw right through it all.

She grumbles, “It says that all anyone has to do to get close to you is understand the smallest bit about you and you’ll let them in.”

“That is just so completely wrong, Y/N, I hate to break it to you.” It’s Harry rolling his eyes now, unable to move much more of his body as she continues painting on the concealer to remove his tattoos for the movie.

“Fine. Enlighten me on what I got wrong.”

Their argument had all but drowned out their music. They both did love this music and ironically if they would just shut their mouths, they’d probably like each other a lot more.

“Might as well,” he sighs. “First of all, my image is authentic and of course I don’t want to give myself all away. I enjoy my privacy and for everyone to truly know me I’d have to give that up. Which I’m not keen on. So, I regret to inform you but I am the same guy everyone is “in love with”. Second, I know I am a little self-involved, how else would I get here if I wasn’t constantly taking inventory of myself and reevaluating who I am. As a musician, I want to give as much of myself as possible or else it just feels inauthentic. And the extravagant thing, I can’t help that I like nice things and my job has allowed me to afford those things.”

He stops to take a deep breath and she’s working in stunned silence, in disbelief that Harry is even telling her any of this or that he’s spoken that much and so quickly. Wasn’t he notorious for speaking slowly with barely even a sentence worth of actual information. He sounds tired and frustrated, but also, surprisingly, sincere.

He continues, “The music thing. Maybe it was a test, but still it doesn’t mean I give everyone a mile when they say their favorite musicians match up with mine or something. I note that they either did their homework or might be an interesting person to get to know.”

“So which am I?” She widens her eyes.

“Obviously the second even if you’re also making it painfully clear that you don’t like me.”

“You’re smarter than I thought, Harry. I’ll give you that,” she smirks slyly, finishing up the bird coverage now.

He laughs. “Thanks,” he drawls out.

“And I admit that maybe you aren’t as easy to read as I made out, but I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree about the whole being your authentic self. I just don’t buy it. I can see your mind working constantly, you’re not one to just let yourself be free in public. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying, you shouldn’t pretend like that’s not what you’re doing.”

Her final thought leaves Harry silent. She pays no attention to his silence or at least she’s actively ignoring it. Instead she tunes back into the music that had gotten them back onto the wrong foot. This was going to be a long few months.

When she’s satisfied with her work, she has them sit there for thirty minutes to give it all time to set before Harry is off to hair and other makeup. They sit there listening to music. Neither of them have spoken again, except instructions from her and Harry’s hums of approval of songs.  

Harry stands up after thirty minutes as she stays behind to pack up some items. Just as he’s about to step out of the door, he turns and calls her name.

“For the record, I don’t think you’re giving me a fair shot. You said yourself that you’re different every day. That every version of you, is you. So I hope you’ll give me the same allowance, every version of me is me. In this trailer, in my music videos, on tv, in interviews, in my free time. It’s all truly me.”

She bites her inner cheek as he ducks his head and exits the trailer, not allowing her any response.

-

“You’re late!”

“Meeting ran over with Nick and Olivia. Sorry,” Harry says as he begins to undress.

It’s the first day she has to cover all of his tattoos. It was going to take forever by all accounts. It had been two weeks since shooting had begun and she had gotten the simple hands and neck down to 45 minutes so she could only dread what his entire body would take.

“It’s fine,” she grumbles, knowing there wasn’t really anything else she could say about him coming late from a meeting with the director and producer.

Over the last two weeks, they hadn’t grown any fonder of one another. Not at all. They at least had gotten into a system though and she was grateful for that at least.

They showed up, Harry got in his chair, she set up the music, and they got to work. Harry would practice lines on some days and he’d tell her that before she turned on the music so there were no interruptions. Sometimes they talked about stuff on set or music or she’d give Harry his line when he was trying to be off script and forgot one. She wouldn’t classify it as pleasant, but they weren’t at each other throats like they were originally.

Trailer 6 had gotten a little homier as the weeks went by, too. Harry began leaving some of his stuff there and he started putting up silly drawings he would make while on set or polaroids people had taken with him while he was there. He tacked up napkins of restaurants that catered the set and wrote funny jokes and quotes on post it notes. His personal assistants sometimes brought in snacks while Y/N was still working and Harry always offered her some. They were usually healthy, but sometimes she’d eat some. Jeff, his manager, had also stopped by on occasion during his tattoo touch-ups that had become a thing after shooting days had grown longer.

On first meeting, Jeff had said, “Y/N? Harry mentioned you.”

She had turned to Harry with an arched brow and he had shrugged. When she looked back at Jeff she didn’t see Harry give Jeff one of the deadliest looks he could muster. She had grimaced and said “Well we spend enough time together for him to know my name. So thank god for that at least.”

They had all laughed and she had gotten back to work on Harry’s wrist.

Today, she needed Harry in his shorts. It was the first day of shooting where his character would be only in his boxers so she had to cover up all his visible tattoos. Olivia had told the makeup department they actually had to cover up his feet tattoos as well. She wanted him sockless in the scene and Y/N had groaned immediately when she made it to the trailer and Harry wasn’t already there.

“But please, for the sake of my job, strip, dude.” She says, arms crossed over her chest and leaning against the counter as she watched Harry set his things down. Her soft green striped cardigan is open, exposing the white tank top sitting underneath. Her bright green shorts hang loose on her, cinched at the waist and folded over once. Her white high top nike’s tap impatiently on the floor, waiting for Harry to get moving.

He nodded, truly feeling sorry for his tardiness, knowing today was a long day. He was anxious and tired. Acting was a different experience to music and he just was really trying his best.

As he began to take off his shirt, he laughed. His arms pulled the shirt over his head and when it popped out from beneath it, he repeated, “Strip, dude,” attempting to mimic her American accent.

He had practiced his American accent in front of her while running lines, but it had a 50’s drawl to it. His acting coach had been drilling him for weeks before shooting and he still liked to practice. The accent he had just down was far off from that and far off from hers too.

“Do not,” she warned.

“What?” He asks innocently and flutters his eyelashes.

She knows his game by now and she knows she should just ignore him. She knows this after fourteen days. She knows this after hours with him. She knows this, but then she’s opening her mouth and playing into his teases.

“Sorry, what’s a word you would know? Mate?” She tries for a British accent with the last word, knowing she can’t win this.

Harry snickers and scratches at his nose with his index finger before starting on taking off his pants. “You’re so Californian.”

“Thank you,” she chirps, moving to sit beside him now that he had settled.

“I like your shorts,” he muses, crossing his legs, likely a little cold.

She glances down at her cotton shorts that showed more of her thighs when she sat for a moment before returning her gaze to his left arm. The longest task of the day was this damn arm.

“Thanks,” she mumbles, “Wanted to be comfortable today. Knew it was gonna be long.”

A smile bubbles onto his face, his pink lips parting to reveal his shiny white teeth behind them. “So true.”

The music is low today. She had chosen Joni Mitchel’s Blue album for the first pick of the day. She had quickly learned Harry preferred listening to albums in order. It tended to make him less jumpy when the same artist came on multiple times like an album. So when she tried to play just an album one day, she found him more cooperative and less irritable.

After thirty minutes of work, she can’t stop noticing how shivery Harry is. It was late October in LA, so it was still warm, but admittedly the mornings could be a little chilly. His shivering was concerning for many reasons. Mainly he was messing up her work and concentration, but she also didn’t want him to get sick or something.

“Do you want me to see if they have a blanket and slippers or something? You look like you’re turning blue.”

Harry turns his attention to her. He had been reading over the script for today again. “That’d be great. I can call…” He trails off trying to think of the name of one of his assistants, but apparently he’s too scatterbrained for it. She assumed it was the hypothermia traveling to his brain already.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll walkie someone.” She says as she grabs the walkie talkie, flicking to the personal assistants channel.

“Hey,” she chirps happily. Harry noted how she talked to other people. So sweet, yet sincere. With him, it was serious and sincere but more biting, callous at times. Less so lately, but she definitely was sharper with him. He didn’t know if it even bothered him anymore. She was engaging if nothing else.

“Is someone free to bring two blankets and men’s slippers over to Trailer 6? I’ve got a naked Jack and I don’t want him freezing before I’m done covering up his tattoos.” She takes her finger off the talking button and glances sideways at him, “Who knows, maybe that would improve his acting. Y’know on second-thought-”

“Alright, alright,” Harry tries to grab for the walkie talkie, but she turns from him holding a finger up signalling him to wait as she listens for a response.

Someone says a simple “On it” and she turns off the walkie talkie and gets back to work.

“I took my finger off the speaker before I said the thing about your acting. Relax, Harry.” She says when he’s still glaring at her. “Just love to see you squirm.”

He shakes out his short chestnut hair, some of it falling over his forehead. Instinctively, she reaches up without even looking and smooths it back. Like she was tucking her own hair out of her eyes, but instead it was Harry’s. She decided to say nothing and was relieved when Harry didn’t say anything either.

She finishes his forearm and moves to his outer upper arm. The rose holds her attention when the PA knocks on the door and she has to race to get it. Nothing could stop her from moving on this work. It was already an hour in and she wanted to scream.

She swings open the door and she wants to die. It was Autumn. Her least favorite PA, of course. She was insufferable and obsessed with Harry. Which was not why Y/N found Autumn insufferable. There were so many more reasons. So many. But that particular character flaw didn’t help her case either. Y/N tried to just take the blankets and slippers from Autumn, but the woman insisted that she come in.

“I’ve got it,” Y/N says.

“No, don’t want you to get makeup on anything,” Autumn’s saccharine voice grinds at her ears and she contemplates cutting them off.

Harry sat in his chair, legs crossed, nodding along to the music, his script discarded on the counter in front of him.

“Hi Harry!” Autumn practically yells, walking right up to him.

Y/N takes a deep breath at the door, letting it swing shut. She bites her lower lip as an attempt to bite her tongue as she walks back to her set-up. The set-up Autumn was conveniently blocking.

“Hello, Autumn,” Harry says kindly, making eye contact with her. “How’re you today?”

“So great! So great! Thanks for asking. How are you?” She points a finger at him like she might poke him and Harry squirms away from her a bit. She, of course, doesn’t notice this.

“Well, thanks.” His eyes flicker to Y/N, who is standing behind Autumn, hands on her hips and attempting not to tap her foot. His tone is clearly dismissive, but Autumn must ignore it. Y/N knows Autumn isn’t as helpless as she tries to come off.

Autumn asks, “Where do you want these?”, gesturing to the two blankets and slippers stacked on top.

“Just on the counter is fine, thanks,” Harry says.

Autumn does as he says and then stands there with baited breath. Y/N’s not sure what she’s expecting. For Harry to ask for her hand in marriage or something? But he just glances between the two women. His own foot begins wiggling in impatience.

“Busy day,” He attempts at dismissing her once again - with kindness.

“Oh my gosh, totally!” Autumn gushes, starting to go off on all of the tasks she has to do. She stands so close to Harry, Y/N genuinely thinks she’s going to sit in his lap. Y/N stares up to the ceiling, begging god or whoever to end her misery right there and then.

Harry sees Y/N’s expression and tries to maintain the neutral expression he’s had for the entirely too long interaction. A smile threatens at his rosey lips that had chapped from the morning air.

“Right, well,” he cuts off Autumn, “Y/N needs to get back to tattoo coverage, I think. So...have a nice day.”

Autumn’s eyes widen like she forgot that there was anyone else in the room and steps back from Harry. Y/N nods, a grimace clear on her face. Autumn gives her the same small she used to get from the popular girls in high school when she happened to be talking to their cool guy friend that they wanted to be more than friends with. Sickeningly sweet and completely fake. She could see the contempt in Autumn’s eyes that swirled just beneath the surface of her perfectly outlined green-ish eyes.

“Okay! You too, Harry!” She begins walking to the door and Y/N takes her seat again, closing her eyes and counting to ten. “And Y/N,” Autumn adds as an afterthought.

“Oh my fucking god,” Y/N sighs, her hands going to rub over her face and through her hair. “That was exhausting. Jesus Christ.”

“What? She’s nice. Maybe a little clueless,” Harry counters. “But she was so nice,” he confirms again, seemingly trying to convince himself of it as well.  

She grabs the slippers and slips them on the ground so Harry can put them on easily. Then one of the blankets that she drapes over Harry’s bottom half. He smiles at the gesture, a ‘thank you’ said in a whisper.

“Please, she knows what she’s doing,” Y/N scoffs, “And she’s obsessed with you!” She grabs the concealer to get back to work, “She was all over you and never took her eyes off of your body. It was like she wanted to touch you or something. It was icky.”

“You touch me,” Harry adds cheekily, adjusting beneath the warm blanket.

She laughs, a smile gracing her lips as she gives Harry a look. He was clever.

“It’s my job to touch you, Harry.”

Harry had really tried to not laugh, but it was just so funny. They both snicker, their eyes meeting for a moment longer than usual.

“Speaking of my job,” she adds after controlling her laughter, “Does she not realize just how long it takes to cover all of your bloody tattoos with this shit to make it look like you’re a pristine skinned 50’s psycho killer?”

She finishes the rose coverup and moves to the ship. Harry nods solemnly.

“It’s true...And it doesn’t help that you’re terrible at it, so it takes a thousand years longer than it should.” He adds, laughter overtaking his serious tone at the end.

“Oh my god!” She shrieks in delight, trying not to mess up her work, “That is so rude! I messed up one time - mostly because of you, by the way. And give me a break, this is so not what I thought I’d be doing as a makeup artist for movies.”

He nods again, muttering “Fair, fair.”

They grow silent, enjoying Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the album that she had queued after Joni’s.

“The body thing, I just learned to ignore it, I think.” Harry mutters, eventually, but it’s thoughtless, like he’s not revealing anything about himself with the statement. But it kind of shocks her. Her eyes widen and she stops her work to stare at his face.

“Harry,” she waits till his eyes meet hers, “That’s, like, not normal. Are you serious?”

“I mean, I’m very comfortable with my body, like I haven’t minded the last 45 minutes of sitting practically nude in front of you. And I have plenty of revealing photos out in the world. I just don’t notice staring anymore, it’s not, I don’t think it’s what you’re thinking,” he tries to reassure her. His eyes are intent on hers, full of seriousness that hadn’t been there a few moments ago.

“It’s one thing to be comfortable in your skin and another to be desensitized to objectification,” she insists.

He nods. “I know. Thank you. I would let you know if what she had done had bothered me, so don’t worry. I felt completely safe the whole time.”

“Good,” she nods back and concentrates again. “Good,” she repeats once more under her breath. There had been way too many distractions already today and she wasn’t even done with his arm yet.

As she continues to work up his arm, Harry sings along to some of the songs on Elton’s album. He happily taps his feet to the different beats, now safely tucked in soft fluffy slippers. She would never admit just how amazing it is to be in the same room as Harry’s singing. It was truly special to be less than a foot from him and hear him sing just under the unique voice of Elton - who was someone he actually knew, which was equally as cool.

He hit every note and knew every word. She was impressed. How could she not be when a literal rockstar sat before her? This was the first time she was truly starstruck by her charge, Mr. Harry Styles.

By two hours, they had moved onto an album by Dolly Parton and they were both singing. They strangely had no fights today, maybe some snarky comments from both of them, but no outright mean-spirited words were exchanged.

She stood in front of Harry, finishing up the swallows. She had finished both arms and the birds, all she had left was moving down his body. Up next, the butterfly.

“I love this tattoo,” she mumbles, twisting Harry’s standing body to face her and taking her seat again. This left her eye to eye with the butterfly on his stomach.

He makes a surprised face and raises his recently plucked eyebrow at his counterpart. “Oh really?”

“Don’t act so surprised. I told you day one that not all of them are rubbish and honestly they’re all pretty cool. I just was so annoyed that I had gotten tattoo coverage as my job and then I had to go and index them all.” She flicks her eyes up to his sculpted face and sees he’s watching her work. “Plus, I have some butterflies of my own, remember?” She grins.

“Yeah,” he ponders her words, “I don’t think that’d put me in a good mood either.”

He pauses again and she continues to work silently.

“So what’s your excuse for the second day then?”

“You provoked me,” she doesn’t spare him a glance, shrugging like it was the simplest answer in the world.

“Pardon?”

“Let’s not go down this road again, Harry.” She sighs, smoothing over the freshly covered butterfly tattoo. His sternum looked so naked, it was unnerving. Now the ferns.

Harry involuntarily shivered when her fingers traced over the ferns lightly, taking note of the expanse of skin she’d have to cover.

“You’re right,” he agrees, “But agree to disagree on the provocation.”

“Sure,” she says curtly, focusing on his skin and her job.

The expanse of skin that the ferns inhabited was slightly fleshy and especially soft. It bordered where his boxers began and she ignored that part of his body completely. It was of no importance to her and she really had no issue blocking it from her vision, even when it was right in front of her. She finishes one fern with Harry jumping only twice from her cold hands. He couldn’t put his robe on until the makeup had all set for half an hour so he’d have to be cold for possibly another hour still.

She traces the fern that is still visible and Harry shivers. She instinctively shushes him softly and his body quiets. As she works, her hair splays around her shoulders and Harry looks down at her working and doesn’t realize what his hand is doing until it’s too late. His right hand runs over her hair, smoothing it out of her face. It was rarely ever down, so it must have been the novelty of it.

“Sorry, I-” he chokes out when he jerks his hand back.

She sits back, slightly taken aback. Her body flushes just from their positioning and what a hair caress would mean normally in this position, but she’s a professional and she shakes it off.

“It’s fine. We’re even.” She assures him, breaking eye contact with his own wide eyes. “Seems like we’re both hair touchers.”

“It’s just so soothing,” Harry muses. “I think it’s human instinct to touch other people’s hair since it’s so enjoyable for yourself.”

“Possibly,” her voice raises, his thought was definitely plausible. Or maybe they were just two touch starved people who were very much in each other’s personal space 24/7.

At the two and a half hour marker, she gets a walkie message from Olivia’s assistant asking when they’d be done. She had just finished the tiger tattoo, which had been surprisingly easy. It took a while, but Harry didn’t shiver once and neither of them pet each other’s hair.

“Probably 40 minutes, sorry. He has a lot of tattoos and the makeup needs to set.” She says seriously and gets back to work, barely regarding the response of “Yeah it’s fine, just wanted an estimate”.

“Jesus,” Harry moans as she covers up his knee tattoos.

She groans in veiled disgust, “Did I just hit a secret erogenous zone? Is that why you have ‘oui’ there, you creep?” There’s a teasing tone behind the nickname she uses.

Harry laughs and runs his hand over his face, pulling at his jaw and lower lip. His jaw is so sharp, she watches him adjust it. “No, no. I’m just so goddamn tired of this.”

“And it’s not your fault,” he adds, feeling bad immediately after he said it. “It’s actually been nice today, but I’m feeling antsy, like I need to move. I don’t like to sit still.”

“I know,” she says under her breath. She simply nods in agreement.

Finally, the tattoos are all covered up and set. They had talked about George Michael when she got to his ankle tattoos that she hadn’t seen before and they laugh about the tattoos and chat a bit more. She helps him slip on his robe that he keeps in his closet in the trailer and then follows him out of it. They had decided they were hungry and he had been pushed back an hour since he had taken so long, so he had a free half-hour.

As they walked to craft services, they talked about actual things besides work. She was pleasantly surprised by what Harry talked about. It was more than music or the movie. It was the tv show he was currently obsessed with and how he hated LA’s traffic the most out of all of his dislikes for the city. She couldn’t help but grin at his Los Angeles slander. She loved this side of him.

-

Breakfast together after finishing his tattoo coverage became their regular thing. He would come into the trailer, racing from his morning meeting accompanied with tea for two, they’d get his tattoos covered as quickly as possible, and then they’d eat together.

They’d save their “in-depth” chats for breakfast. In early November, he joked about No Nut November and insisted he really wouldn’t have a problem with it - which had made her laugh. They worried together over the U.S. presidential election and meditated together in his trailer to Fleetwood Mac.

Around late November, Harry had requested that Y/N just do his face makeup as well, just to simplify his life a little more and the department had agreed easily. She had to spend extra time on set getting lectured on how to properly do Harry’s makeup, but after two days she stopped getting notes about it. She was so extremely proud and thankful to Harry for doing that.

All he said was: “I mean, you’re extremely talented so I’m not scared of you fucking up my face. Plus, it does make my life easier. Two birds with one stone.”

In late November, he told her about his favorite holiday drinks at Starbucks and what he was getting his mother for Christmas.

When the Vogue cover came out, he laughed over that woman who responded to his cover saying the world needed to bring back manly men. He joked that he was going to really push that from now on, that he was a manly man, and he would sputter with laughter every time he tried to say it with a straight face.

He hand delivered her a special ‘Treat People With Kindness’ sweatshirt that he only had for the cast and crew of the film. Most everyone got them from a PA, but Harry decided since you saw him first in the morning, why not.

He told her about him winning Hitmaker of the Year from Variety when he had left the award sitting in Trailer 6 and about how weird it was to film acceptance speeches in an empty room. His smile had lit up the entire set that day and the day he did his interview on set. He was so smiley she had to bump him with her elbow because he wouldn’t stop smiling at her and it was unnerving.

“Stop that,” She muttered.

“Stop what?” He smiles wider.

“That!” She squeaked, her head shaking as she ducked it to regard his anchor tattoo. “You’re smiling too much.”

“Oh no,” he says sarcastically, “God forbid I be happy.”

“It’s not that,” she bumps his thigh with her elbow, trying to keep her own smile off her face, “Your face is just so intense when you smile. Feels like you’re gonna burn a hole through me.”

He laughs, completely unconvinced, “You just don’t want me to be happy is what I’m hearing.”

She rolls her eyes, “Whatever, dude.”

She saw he was serious about the ‘manly men’ references when the Variety photos came out and everyone and their mom posted the pictures with some variation of that comment as their caption.

She still found that she rolled her eyes at some of the things Harry did, but she genuinely counted him as a friend by the time December had rolled around.

Over three hours, almost always completely alone, doing work for a job you both care deeply about can really make or break a relationship. And that first full-body coverage day had made them stronger together. After that, Harry and her would banter with one another, but there was never anything intentionally cruel. Just friends giving each other shit sometimes. Harry had been right, he had changed her mind about him. And she had realized that that was who Harry was. He was a deliverer. If you didn’t like him at first, he would try and try again until you did, but he did it in a way that wasn’t weasley or anything. It was terribly genuine and she saw it in every relationship he had on set.

On several occasions she had witnessed his friendship with Nick Kroll. A man she had regarded with dislike before the film. She had quickly realized that dislike was misplaced, but she maintained that it was just because she hated adult cartoons - citing that she literally refused to be friends with any person who willingly watched the Simpsons, Family Guy, and/or American Dad and all of those similar shows.

Nick was far nicer and less weird than she had realized. So she quickly shot her friend from high school an apology text for all the Nick Kroll slander she had spouted back in the day. Her friend had rejoiced but also said how jealous she was that Y/N got to see him regularly on set.

Nick and Harry got along great. Harry generally got along better with older people, she noticed when she was introduced to his friends on the somewhat frequent occasion. Trailer 6 was where Y/N saw most of these reactions take place. She would be introduced in the first minute and then she would smile politely and get back to the work of covering up Harry’s numerous tattoos.

Harry would say something simple and Nick, the literal famous comedian, would laugh. In the beginning she’d raise a brow, confused because it truly wasn’t that funny, but as Harry’s friend now, she kept her mouth shut.

Nick would come and sit on the couch while she’d work and eventually all three of them would chat. Sometimes she would get up to go to the bathroom during those morning chats and she would look in the mirror and think to herself “How are you casually talking to these two men right now” and then she’d think “Because you are a boss ass bitch, you got this” and go back out there with a smile on her face.

“Y/N, what are you doing tonight?” Nick asked on the first Friday morning of December.

She looks up from Harry’s cross tattoo that was half covered. Harry was reading, a book casually propped in his right hand and glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. He glanced at the other two in the room. Nick had been getting some work done before he had spoken.

“No plans,” she states simply before getting back to work. It wasn’t full body today, but it was arms and torso, so kind of a lot still.

“You should come over for dinner at my place with Harry,” Nick smiles kindly. His scruff was really coming in today. “To celebrate us almost wrapping the first half of the movie.”

Harry had thankfully freshly shaved before he sat down. It was her least favorite part of her new job. Whenever he came in for touch ups and she had to shave his afternoon shadow. She was terrified she’d cut him and never live it down from her department or Harry. She had no idea which would be worse.

“My wife will be there too, of course,” he adds, hoping to entice her to say yes.

Harry glances between Y/N and Nick again before focusing on his book again.

She purses her lips, finishing Harry’s hand and moving onto the anchor tattoo. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know why I’d say no. As long as I’m not intruding on the throuple,” she grins up at Harry.

He stares at her with his big green eyes, slightly obscured behind his prescription glasses. He raises his brows and wiggles them a little bit, teasingly.

Nick laughs and slyly winks at Harry through the mirror. Y/N none the wiser as she removes all traces of Harry’s tattoos.

“Great!” He claps his hands and stands up. “We’ll talk or I’ll make sure Harry gets you the info or something. I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out. My wife’s been wanting to meet you,” he smiles again and walks out of the trailer.

She tilts her head at the last part. He talked about her to his wife. Did he really count her as that close of a friend? She was just a makeup artist and he was a producer… She glances at Harry and he gives away nothing. His jaw looks extra prominent and she knows it’s because he’s clenching it. He did that when he was focused or angry, remembering it bulging on the first day they met and how clenched it had been then.

“Unclench your jaw,” she mutters, “It’s not good for you.”

Harry hums and unclenches it.

He stretches his neck by rolling his head around his shoulders and she glances at the movement. His skin is still beautifully sun-kissed and his pores look so soft, only his moles change the texture of his skin. She loves his moles though, they make him especially unique in her eyes. Not that he needed anything else to set him apart from the crowd. Still, she loved them. His collarbone is prominent as he sits there shirtless and she wishes she could reach out and brush at it. But she gets back to work, knowing the only time she’s gonna be brushing near that part of him is when she’s covering dates in those dips behind his collarbones.

“Y’know, I could just drive you to Nick’s tonight,” Harry says, putting his book down and taking off his glasses. He rubs at his eye with his free hand.

“You’re blind and British, how do I know you can even drive yourself?” She asks sillily, pointing to his glasses.

He shakes his head, “I’m serious, Y/N. Aren’t you staying in the same area as me?”

He asks because they had relocated to Palm Springs a little while ago and everyone had gotten rentals and it was hard to remember where everyone was holed up when they weren’t on set.

“Yeah, think so. But you don’t need to pick me up. I have a car.”

“Nonsense. I’ve been to his place before, don’t want you to have to deal with directions, that’s just silly.”

“I guess...” she resigns relatively easily. She had never hung out with Harry off the set or Nick for that matter. It felt surreal, but she knew the right answer was usually just say yes in these situations. So that’s what she says. “Yes, that’d be great, thank you,” she confirms and watches as Harry’s eyes glimmer softly before turning back to his book. A triumphant soft smirk rests on his face.

The words die out between the two of them as she works on. He hums along to the music and continues reading his book. When she’s done with his tattoo coverage and his face makeup, she sends him off to hair and the rest of his day. He gives a flirty wink as he walks out the door and she rolls her eyes in response. She tidies up her kit and then goes to do some other makeup work.

When she wasn’t working with Harry, she was assigned to some of the minor characters and doing their makeup. They were always her second concern, especially now that she did Harry’s makeup as well as his tattoos. As she works on them, she can feel her mind drifting to Harry. Harry and how they were friends now. She was pretty sure, right? They were friends. He had never really said a mean thing to her if she really thought about it. It was her… She had been rude and mean-spirited and he had just taken it. He rarely had even thrown it back at her. He was so good to her and patient and she realized that he had proven to her that he was good. He was better than good, he was kind and loving. Considerate. Wonderful. All of those positive superlatives, Harry filled them. And she had the audacity to be mean to him.

She paused the brush that was adding blush to an actresses cheek.

Lisa, the actress, looks at Y/N confusedly, “What’s wrong?”

Y/N twitches her head, refocusing on her task at hand. The realization of her pausing her work becomes clear as she looks between her hand and the cheek that has not enough blush on it. “Oh,” she breathes. “...I just realized that I was terrible to someone who doesn’t have a mean bone in their body.”

Lisa nods, “Apologize.”

“Yeah, I mean...We’ve kind of moved past the phase where we don’t get along. Like now we’re friends, but the realization just really hit me.” She sighs, picking up where she left off on Lisa’s makeup. “I’ll make sure to apologize next time I see them.”

Lisa smiles.

-

At the end of the day, Y/N realizes she left her tattoo coverage kit in Harry’s room after their touch-up session halfway through the day. She had run off to help with a makeup emergency for a tiny cut on a minor character’s face and forgotten to go back and grab her things. Another roll of her eyes and a huff of breath and then she’s walking back to Trailer 6, a place that seemed like a home away from home now. She knocks, patiently waiting at the bottom of the steps.

Harry swings open the door and props it with his hip. He’s got a toothbrush held in his mouth, slowly scrubbing back and forth with his left hand. His costume is somewhat taken off, he’s still got the pants on with suspenders hanging down, his chest was completely bare and he looked funny with some of his tattoos only being half covered based on what parts of his skin had been showing today. Her work. His skin looked half silky smooth and half tattooed like usual.

His naked skin seemingly left her breathless because as her eyes returned to Harry’s face, she breathed a soft, “Hi.”

“Hey,” a smirk twists onto his face. “Forget something?”

“Yes,” she nods, coming back to her senses and entering the trailer at Harry’s gesture.

She begins to pack up the kit that had been left haphazardly strewn around on his counter. “I’m sorry I left a mess like this, I got called over to something else and forgot.”

“Don’t worry darling,” Harry grins at his joke.

She looks up from her work and sees Harry in the reflection of the mirror. He’s wiping off the makeup from his chest and his beautiful tattoos reemerge as entire images.

She laughs humorlessly, “It gets less funny each time you use that.”

“That’s not true,” he looks at her through the mirror now, his green eyes trained on her face, “Everyone else still thinks it’s hilarious.”

“They’re humoring you and your fragile ego,” she winks and watches as Harry’s smirk twitches from his perfect face.

“You’ve got a very mean disposition, you know that?” He asks.

He finishes his chest and moves to remove the makeup from his left arm, glancing at the mirror every so often to check himself and to flicker his eyes over Y/N’s face.

She genuinely laughs at that, but scolds herself internally for being mean when she had planned to apologize the next time she saw Harry. This was the next time so why was she doing this instead?

“Rewrite sweet disposition for me?” Her voice honeyed. Clearly stubborn and terrible at saying sorry...maybe her and Harry were a better match than she realized.

Harry twists his lips as he slips on his t-shirt he was wearing today.

“Pick you up at 6:30?” He says as his head pops out from beneath the rainbow striped sweatshirt he slipped on top of the shirt. His chestnut hair had been toweled out and was flopping over his forehead slightly.

She sighs and zips close the kit, standing from the seat she had taken at his counter and turning to face him now.

“6:30 is perfect. Thanks again for doing this. I just can’t believe Nick Kroll is inviting me over for dinner!” She smiles, shifting to lean against the counter as she waits for Harry to finish up. She didn’t have to but for some reason she felt like she was in no rush.

“Are you serious?” He’s moved on to changing his pants now and he’s slipping on black sweatpants.

“Yeah…” She blinks and her eyes widen as Harry appraises her expression.

He straightens up after fixing a cuff on the pants and he can’t tell if she’s being genuine or sarcastic. It was always so hard to tell with her.

“I mean, Nick Kroll is like a huge celebrity and I know in the entertainment business you’re not supposed to get starstruck but when I was in college my sister thought he was weirdly hot and my friends and I would shit talk him. I don’t know, it’s just kind of surreal to be having dinner at his place. Like I’ve watched him on tv and now I’ll be eating with him...so weird.”

He shakes his head, beginning on his dirty vans now. A small laugh escapes his mouth and he glances between her and his shoe, scratching his head quickly. “I still can’t tell… It feels like you’re fucking with me right now.”

“I’m not!” She insists, her hands coming out in front of her in a confused fashion. “I used to watch that guy’s tv show then he’s my boss now he’s inviting me over for food? It’s a lot to process.”

“How come it’s not surreal to be having dinner with me then?” He asks semi-joking, a hint of offense tinged within it. It’s visible only in his knitted brow and twisted lip.

“Careful there, sailor. Venturing into some dangerously self-absorbed waters.” Her eyes light up, a quick raise of her brows accompany the shine, and she decides now is her time to head out. Especially as she thinks about getting ready for this soiree tonight. She needed to shower and pick out an outfit with less than two hours to prepare.

Harry sputters at her response and fumbles with his pink shoelace. “That’s not...that is - You’re being unfair. My question is valid.”

She shrugs her shoulders and skirts Harry’s attempt at grabbing at her arm to stop her from leaving. “Okay, Mr. Big Man On Campus. I promise you you’re the most popular boy in school.”

She blows him a kiss and walks out the door as he attempts to get her to come back by calling her name a few times and slightly shouting “C’mon! I wasn’t being insecure. That was a reasonable ask…”

He sighs and shakes his head again. Every interaction would end with one of them either rolling their eyes or shaking their head and usually a sigh on both of their lips. It was exhausting, but exhilarating too.

20 minutes later, Harry receives a text from Y/N: “You’re still picking me up right :))) ?”

He’s in his car, getting ready to finally leave after getting held up with last minute schedule changes that he had to be informed about by some PA that he had forgotten the name of. His lip quirks to the right and he closes his eyes for a second enjoying seeing her name on his phone screen for a moment.

He types back: “Of courseeee”.

“Fab.” She sends back, immediately followed by: “Fanks BMOC ;)”

A full smile rolls onto Harry’s face after he swipes his tongue over his lower lip. “Yeah, yeah, save it for the next guy” he types out quickly before throwing his phone gently beside him and driving back to his apartment. She made him feel young, not that he wasn’t young, but generally his friends didn’t text like she did.

-

At 6:28, she receives a text from Harry Styles - his name in her phone. A name she had never expected to see in her phone unless her Spotify was on shuffle. Yet, instead, his name popped up under messages and it read “Here!” followed by a quick “I think” and then a phone call coming through from the apparently anxious man himself.

“Hello Harry.” Her tone even. She throws little items into her purse, making sure everything she needs is there.

“Could you peek out your window? I’m not quite sure I’m at the right place and people are staring…” nerves laced in his rushed tone.

She ambles to the window and opens up the shade she had closed to change. Below her, she sees a sleek black Range Rover with a slightly disarrayed hairdo and big dark glasses peeking below the windshield. She ignored the instinct to retch at the sight of the Range Rover and peered at the lamp lit sight below her. It was definitely Harry, but she searched for the prying eyes he was worried about and saw none. Well, maybe a few, but it wasn’t a lot.

“I see you, I’ll be right out, dude. Just deep breaths, it’s mostly crew staying here right now so they’re just seeing that it’s you, another guy they work with. They won’t come up for pictures...I would hope.”

She hangs up with no farewell, snatches her purse from its place on the bed and races out the door. Harry smiles anxiously at her when she stands next to the passenger’s door and he unlocks it. She bites her lip and raises her brows, waiting to hear if anything terrible happened in the minute and a half it took her to come downstairs and out to the car.

“Hi,” he exhales.

A smirk crawls onto her features and her eyes sparkle with a bit of a childish glee that normally she didn’t exhibit as she glances at him. “Hi.” She says quietly. “Alright big boy?”

“‘M fine.” He huffs but balks at her smile that she maintains while she stares at him. “What?”

“Just happy to see you, I guess,” her smile returns after speaking and Harry glances between her face and the windshield in front of him.

He can’t tell if she’s being serious or not once again. But he fears that conversation of her either ridiculing him for thinking she is serious or being offended that he still can’t tell. Instead, he will keep his mouth shut. For the most part.

“Happy to see you, too,” his lips create a closed mouth smile quickly before turning out of the parking lot.

She watches him. Their first time together outside of work. And they were friends. She needed to get used to simply thinking that. He picked her up to take her to dinner with her other friend and his wife. This was normal life, just with big names behind those terms of relation. Jesus, she always said it didn’t bother her to be around celebrities so why did she think about it so damn much?

She twitches her head and refocuses on Harry and his driving. His jaw is clenched again and she wants to reach out and sooth it herself. Instead she starts to open her mouth to correct him, but stops herself from that as well. They weren’t at work and it didn’t feel like something just a friend would say right now. She refocuses on the view of his eyes that are barely visible while he regards the road. His large eyes that she had grown acquainted to are surveying what he’s doing, every so often drifting to the right side of the road to check out the lane beside him. But then, always back to right in front of him, leaving a crescent of green visible to her.

“Can feel you staring at me…” His voice sounds like it’s rolled around in gravel after the long work day. It makes her wonder if he’s supposed to have a vocal rest when he’s not at work, but then again it’s the weekend now so maybe it was fine. Maybe she should ask him. Or maybe she should stop worrying so much about him.

“Have I got something on my face?” His low register bumps her from her racing thoughts. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, but she can see he’s widened his eyes in wonder.

“No! Of course not, I just was...making sure you weren’t going to crash us or something.” She grasps at straws, desperate to not be caught by Harry.

A low chuckle bubbles from his chest and he spares a small glance over at her bundled up in his passenger seat. She matches his gaze with something of distrust hidden behind her eyes. She hopes to convey that she’s being silly and when Harry turns back to look at the road unassumingly, she feels like she has won. The harmonies of the beginning of a Queen song take over the silence, Harry’s spindly fingers thrumming against the wheel.

They arrive at the Kroll’s Palm Springs residence at 6:50. 10 minutes early and the two twiddle their thumbs for a few minutes, trying to pass the time and not intrude earlier than they were supposed to. She appreciated that Harry liked to be timely but not early, similar to how she was.

“So what is the fascination with Range Rovers?” She queries, leaning against the door’s armrest. The back of her head touches against the semi-tinted window.

Harry shifts in his seat, seat belt no longer constricting him and no road requiring his attention as they sit in the driveway. He rushes a hand through his hair and lets a single strand of hair fall over his prominent forehead.

“Dunno,” he shrugs his shoulders and allows a hand to fall onto the steering wheel absentmindedly. “I don’t really prefer them anymore, but when I’m in LA and doing work, it makes things easier. My other cars are a little flashier...have more privacy in this.”

“Yet the effect is similar,” she muses.

Her head tilts to take in Harry’s appearance, sharp black silky button-up and dark green plaid slacks, and she rubs a hand over her jaw. His eyes flicker to the movement and attempt to really take it in, even in the dim glow of the lamp light outside barely peeking into the dark interior of the car.

“Effect?”

“Y’know…” She arches her brow at him. He feigns innocence or possibly the expression is genuine. She’s begun to realize Harry was as genuine as they came, but she just didn’t think he was that unaware. An assumption that was likely correct, but even Harry liked to pretend he was a completely unassuming individual.

“Forget it,” she finishes when he gives no indication that he knows what she is hinting at. She doesn’t want to get into it with him again. Especially when he plays at this game where he has no idea what she’s talking about. It made her feel like she was crazy for thinking he made these calculated decisions to get his desired outcomes.

They move on, neither of them quite sure what the other was getting at in that conversation. The two of them walk into the house a minute before their expected arrival time side by side and are greeted happily with Nick and his wife. They’re ushered in and Y/N is happily received by the happy couple.  

“So, Y/N, how’s it been for you working with these two? I know they can be more than a handful - especially together,” Nick’s wife, Lily, asks after a sip of wine.

The group of four had been eating for a while with Nick and Harry bantering for quite a bit at the beginning about whether or not Harry would be willing to hand feed Nick. The answer was settled at “another time”.  

Harry seems to have a very specific habit of watching whoever is speaking - no matter what. So after Lily has finished speaking, his gaze flickers to Y/N, the person his brain expects to speak next. He watches her attentively as she wipes her mouth on her napkin before speaking.

Her hair was styled differently tonight than it usually was on set, she had it down rather than up in a ponytail or braids. He hadn’t had time to really look at her when they had been in the car, his mind occupied with stress and exhaustion that he refocused into driving and deep breathing. Now, in the comfort of a trusted friend’s home, he was far more relaxed and able to truly take in her appearance, which he couldn’t help but think was beautiful. He’d have to tell her that at some point. That he thought she was beautiful. Not that he didn’t see her on set and think she was beautiful...he just hadn’t really thought about it before. She was his wily makeup artist who was critical of him most times, but occasionally sweet, who had an amazing taste in music and good aesthetic style. The beauty part of it all, he guessed wasn’t something integral to their relationship before.

But now he was sitting beside her at the Kroll’s nice dining table and she had her hair splayed in front and behind her shoulders with one side tucked behind her ear and her outfit fit her impeccably. The top she had on had capped sleeves that cinched with buttons at her delicate wrists and a severe drop to create a small sweetheart neckline just above the curve of her breasts. It was silky and shiny, a blush pink that complemented the high waisted dark grey slacks that flared over shiny black boots that he wasn’t sure where they ended beneath the pants.

“Well,” she starts, chuckling under her breath when she meets Harry’s stare, “Harry and I spend a lot of time together, covering up all his tattoos, and he yaps a lot. So, it’s actually pretty refreshing when Nick comes in, because Harry’s then talking half the normal amount.”

He huffs a scoff, while Lily and Nick laugh happily. Nick interjects an “ouch” for the bite she just took out of Harry, but she thought it was fine, he can take it.

Harry thought to himself that if she can serve it, then she can definitely take it. His eyes remain on her as he opens his mouth to speak, but then look at Lily when words actually come out. “Well, Y/N, she thinks she can read people really well, but it’s actually quite the opposite. She had me completely wrong when we first met, so I talk now in hopes that she’ll really understand me.”

His head tilts to her when he mentions her name, but otherwise doesn’t glance her way away again. He scrunches his nose at the end of his comment, implying he converses with her out of pity.

It’s her turn to scoff and stare at him unamused. Nick and Lily share a look, unsure of what was going on, they had concocted this dinner date idea in hopes to set the two up but the way this conversation was going, they seemed to be pushing each other further and further away from one another.

“That’s simply not true,” she says curtly and takes a sip of her quickly emptying wine glass.

“Which part?”

“Almost all of it, I’d say,” her eyes glaring back at him, fiery with a disdain he hadn’t seen in awhile. “You’re proving my original perception of you with every passing second,” she adds.

“Care to elaborate exactly what the original perception of me was for the class,” his eyes are wide and wild, any extra adoration he had started to feel towards her slipping away just as quickly as it had come, like a wave along the beach.

“You know, so why don’t you?”

“I want to hear you say it,” he grits out the command.

She shifts in her seat, glancing at Nick and Lily who are watching on and she has a feeling she won’t be getting an invitation again anytime soon. Lily gives her a semi-reassuring smile like she was sorry to have asked the question at all, but Y/N knows this is kind of her fault, not that she would ever admit that. Her comment could have been taken innocuously, but Harry’s pride wouldn’t let it slide. Like she said, she should have known better, the weeks of friendship were flying out the window and she was helping them along.

“And what if I don’t?”

“Have fun calling an uber at this time of night,” he shrugs, malice dripping in his tone.

She truly was taken aback at this. A slight sound of shock leaving her mouth. Harry was many things, impatient and anxious usually, but downright cruel with her, she had yet to see it. Arrogant and pompous, definitely, but this wickedness that was starting to creep from the shadows worried her. But the little fiery demon within her wasn’t going anywhere either - yet she might back down to save herself some money and hassle.

“Fine,” she raises her brows in a challenge to him and restates her original take on him - possibly adding a bit extra malice in her phrasing, “You are a shell of a man, held up by the people around you, creating the illusion of a completely genuine and down to earth rocker who dabbles in acting, philanthropy and all around goodness. No one’s ever had a bad experience because no one’s ever truly met you. Not the real you.” She takes a deep breath as she shakes her head in disbelief now, a sarcastic laugh leaving her mouth, “And I thought, I really thought, that I had been wrong. Because these past months you really fooled me with your sweet smile and deep eyes. But when it comes down to it, you tricked me just like everyone else.”

Harry stares at her blankly and she shakes her head once more, feeling foolish. For thinking Harry was someone he wasn’t. For thinking the past few months had been real. For thinking that tonight would go off without a hitch. And the shit part of it was that she had really hoped that all of it was true. She wanted this to be her life, but her instincts had been right. Beware of the picture perfect because it always is just a mirage of deceit and lies.

“All I’ve got to say is you’re a damn good actor Harry, so at least you’ve got that going for you.” Then she pushes back from the table and stands, turning to Nick and Lily. “I really am so sorry, I understand that you probably want me to leave, so I’ll just be going,” her voice faltering at the end, she wasn’t as strong as she liked to pretend and she was pretty sure she just ruined her chances of working again in Hollywood. You’d have to be an idiot to be an enemy of Harry Styles and she feels like she just became his first.

“No!” Nick says quickly, standing too, “I think things just escalated really quickly and some things were said that both of you didn’t mean. Um...just, let’s take a few minutes to cool off. Harry could you and Lily deal with the dishes and I’m going to talk with Y/N alone.”

Everyone nods and Y/N follows Nick down a hallway, a little confused but following after he beckons her with his hand. They go out a side door and end up on a porch in the backyard. He stoops down and opens a little sitting mailbox she didn’t see and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He places one between his teeth and then offers one to her. She accepts, not usually a regular smoker, but right now seemed like a fair time to indulge in the bad habit. She needed to calm her rapidly beating heart.

He lights the cigarette for her when he sees her shaking hands and then in turn lights his own. They stand on the porch beside each other and stare out into the dark night sky.

“Well, this wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go,” Nick starts, after a few exhales of smoke.

“No,” she laughs nervously, her foot toeing at the wooden slate on the porch. “I shouldn’t have tried to make a joke.”

“No one’s to blame,” Nick says quickly, glancing at her, “You and Harry...you both have really strong personalities and I don’t think either of you are used to being challenged.”

She nods along, she definitely had to agree after the argument they had both willingly gotten into in front of other people.

“I think that can be a really good thing, challenging each other, because then you two can both grow. But what happened in there was more of a battle to the death rather than a friendly spar.”

“Yeah,” she exhales, flicking at the burning cigarette between her fingers, “I don’t know why he gets under my skin sometimes in a way I’ve never dealt with and it’s kind of uncomfortable so I lash out, I guess.”

Nick stays quiet, taking a drag of his cigarette.

“Ugh,” she groans, “I wish I hadn’t done that. We were doing so well, it’s like I don’t even really know what I’m saying, it’s like I can’t handle a friendly spar, I always end up going in for the kill - as you put it.”

She rubs at her face with her free hand and then takes a drag herself. Nick bites at his lower lip, trying to think of a solution.

“Y’know? Lily and I had concocted this plan to try and set you and Harry up tonight,” he says slowly, revealing the plan that had clearly been taken off the table as they just needed to attempt to salvage cordiality.

“Really?!” She’s in complete disbelief and slight dismay that the plan was seemingly ruined.

“Well,” he sputters, “When the two of you aren’t throwing verbal fireballs at each other, you’re actually quite sweet to one another. Those fond little glances you hope no one sees, well he does that too, and you both fail miserably because I see it all the time. I’m sure plenty of people do too.”

“Oh,” she states, visibly deflating. She looks to the ashtray conveniently on a table behind her and presses out the rest of the cigarette. “Should probably talk to him, huh?”

Nick nods, stamping out his nub of a cigarette as well. They go back inside and into the kitchen where Lily and Harry have plated dessert. Harry looks a little sheepish, likely having a similar conversation with Lily and she wouldn’t be surprised if her expression looks similar, if not a bit more flushed from the outdoor chill.

Lily murmurs that she and Nick are going to eat their dessert in the living room, a fair bit away from the kitchen and the two now deflated counterparts nod and then stare at each other, knowing what they need to do.

“Can we talk?” Harry rasps out, his voice even lower as he speaks softly, a mere foot away from her in the kitchen.

She nods, but moves further from him to lean against the counter and tuck her hands behind her. She’s lost her appetite and doesn’t want Harry to see her shaking digits.

He’s ducked his head and a stray curl falls over his forehead, laying there softly. He doesn’t move to fix it, just stares at his feet until she begins to talk. He can’t not look at her face when she speaks.

“So…” She slowly starts, not enjoying the tension in the room. Her eyes can’t meet his though, his stare dark and unnerving like usual, but almost painfully so now. “I can start.” She kicks at the tiling on the floor like she had done outside as well, trying to not think about the eyes trained on her right now. “I’m sorry I lashed out on you, Harry. I didn’t mean what I said, it was just a heat of the moment response.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Harry says immediately once she finishes speaking, “I shouldn’t have gotten upset over a silly joke and brought up a sensitive subject. Then it escalated…”

“Yeah, I really liked the friendship we’ve garnered these past few months and I just can’t believe I almost ruined everything - including my career…” she squeaks at the end and tears start to roll from her eyes. “Oh god,” she is hit with the gravity of all that she almost ruined as Harry stares at her again. “I’m so sorry, Harry, I really am. Do you forgive me? I don’t think I could stand it if you didn’t.”

She stands there and feels sobs wrack through her and her hands go to cover her face out of embarrassment. She had caused a scene and now she was making another one. In front of Harry.

In an instant his arms are wrapped around her frame and he’s hushing her cries. They had never hugged before, but now seemed like as good a time as ever. His arms were strong around her and she pressed her face into his chest, not caring at all about how she looked or whether this was worse than getting in a fight and running off.

“Of course I forgive you,” he says and then begins repeating her name over and over, trying to soothe her. He definitely had been hurt by her words, but it seemed like she was more upset about the whole situation than he was and he didn’t think bringing up what specifically had hurt him would help her frame of mind.

She settles after some time, her whimpers and tears subsiding after being rocked into a more peaceful mindset with the help of Harry’s calming voice and reassuring embrace.

“I really am sorry,” she whispers again.

Harry pulls his neck back and his head off the top of her head to look at her face. It was tear stained and her eyes were glassy, lips slightly puffy. He gave her a soft tight-lipped smile. “No more apologies,” he states sternly and then softens again at the slight quiver in her lip. He pulls from her a little more, leaving her at arm's length, with his hands still attached to her hips, fingers slipping over the plaid fabric. “I meant to tell you this earlier, before things…” he stares at her face again and she holds it this time, “You look beautiful tonight.”

She scoffs and her eyes immediately drop to her feet, “Definitely not anymore.” She doesn’t believe Harry.

“‘M serious,” he insists. His right index finger goes to rest beneath her chin and brings her face up to look back at him.

“Sure,” she says, still not convinced but not sure how else to respond. She feels herself warming at all the positive attention he’s pouring into her.

His gaze won’t falter from her face, he’s intent upon making her understand him. He whispers her name, “Accept the compliment.”

“You’re stubborn,” she notes.

“So are you,” he counters quickly.  

“Fine, thank you,” she sighs when he won’t stop giving her that look of his. That look that makes her want to melt into the ground because it feels like she’s the only person in the world. “Though you looked especially good tonight, too,” she adds, her hands rubbing over his shoulders softly.

“Thank you,” Harry states lowly, the words only traveling to her ears. His hands fiddle with the sides of her top, thinking about the night and where they were now. Her eyes were red from crying and overall she looked tired beyond her years. “Do you want me to take you home?”

“That’d be nice.”

They make a quiet farewell to Nick and Lily, as well as apologies from both her and Harry. They don’t speak in the car and the music plays loud enough for it to not seem unreasonable for them to be silent. Harry’s hands don’t tap against the steering wheel, they sit in their spots stoically doing their job and nothing more. She watches the window, legs crossed and hands clasped in her lap. She’s thankful for the music because she knows that even though they had talked, it wasn’t enough. What she had said was hurtful and one apology wasn’t enough for how she had behaved. She didn’t think her and Harry would be the same after tonight, but the silence made it possible for her to pretend none of it had happened.

Just as Harry’s car is pulling up the apartment complex that is far darker now, the harsh splatter of rain begins to fall on the pavement and the sleek black car the two are still sat in.

“Oh,” she comments offhandedly, just responding to what she had noticed.

The rain grows louder when Harry parks and then turns off the car. He glances at her for the first time since they got into the car. She registers the look out of the corner of her eye, her face still looking out at the rain. She loved the rain, but there wasn’t always a lot in Southern California, especially not in Palm Springs. It seemed that tonight was different.

“Well,” Harry breaks his silence, she thinks that’s her cue to leave and unbuckles her seatbelt, but he continues. “This certainly wasn’t how I expected this night to go.”

She stops moving, her hand hovering over the handle of the door. She sits back and settles into the seat, feeling her teeth bite into the plush of her bottom lip.

“That’s what people keep saying,” her eyes remain on the rain hitting the front of the car, the splatters of seemingly black liquid that form when the clear rain touches the onyx hood of the car.

“Huh?” Harry grows perplexed at the rather wistful tone of her and how she won’t look at him again. He was still hurt, but he had hoped them talking in the kitchen had straightened some things out. During the car ride he hadn’t wanted to talk, but it didn’t mean he was still angry with her. Just confused, and growing further confused by the second.

“Oh,” she repeats, “Didn’t Lily say? Her and Nick concocted that dinner in hopes to set us up.”

Harry hums, knowing that because Nick had left out a little part of that plan. That he had been a part of it. He had been talking with Nick about getting to know her better outside of work and how Nick had thought it’d be a good idea to have dinner so he had told Lily and they set it up like a casual dinner party. Harry didn’t know how to respond because her knowing that he was in on the plan might just make matters worse. He really didn’t think things could get much worse, but it seemed that they always managed to make it happen so in the end he decided to keep his mouth shut.

“I don’t know if we’d ever be able to work out differences out for that,” she decides to continue, when Harry stays quiet. She scans the interior of the car and watches Harry for the briefest moment before going back to looking out the window. “Nick said that we challenge each other to grow, but all I see us do is hurt each other.”

Her voice is just above the rain pattering outside the car and Harry thinks it sounds almost melodic if it weren’t for the sadness laced in every word.

“I disagree,” he states before wetting his lips.

“Of course you do,” she laughs in spite of herself.

“Even after all these months together and you still don’t get it. I like you.”

“You don’t like me, I don’t know how you could ever like me,” she shakes her head. “We just...we get under each other’s skin. You can make me so angry sometimes and I know I make you angry too. And when we’re not angry, we’re focussed on something that doesn’t have to do with ourselves.”

“I don’t think what you feel for me is anger,” Harry insists, “Just because something feels burning and fiery, frustrating even, doesn’t mean it’s anger.”

His body shifts closer to the center divide and she turns to face him finally. His eyes are extra dark in this lighting, which is barely there from a streetlamp a ways off. She longs for the comfort of his light green eyes, the soft pale glow of the moss that seems to have been trapped within his iris. Maybe for that reason she unknowingly leans closer to him.

“Then what is it?” She whispers, eyes blinking slowly as her breathing grows strained.

“Passion.”

Immediately, her head is tilting to meet his lips. Her mind knows one thing, she needs to be kissing Harry right now. And then she is. His left hand goes to cup her cheek as his lips attach themselves to hers. His soft lips press to hers in a long searing kiss. They stay there for a moment, pressing all of that passion and frustration into the kiss.

She presses impatiently forward, her lips starting to move more, wanting to kiss him deeper. Harry obliges, parting his lips and kissing her more vigorously. He licks into her open mouth and smiles at the sound she makes in appreciation for his actions.

She’s shifted to have herself kneeling on the leather seat and she’s leaning over the console. One of her hands finds purchase on Harry’s thigh and grasps tightly, her other at the back of his neck, pressing him closer if it were possible.

His chest is pressing against hers as he pulls her closer. He kisses her and his fingertips rub softly at the apple of her cheek. Eventually they run behind the shell of her ear and trail down her neck.

Eventually, she pulls away and stares at Harry. She watches as his eyes flutter open gently. His soft eyelashes dust his cheeks before moving away, allowing his eyes to peer at her in the dark.

Her breathing feels a little irregular after the kissing and she’s sure she is heaving her chest slightly, likely mirroring Harry’s chest as well.

“So, where to now?” She inquires, lips quirked up at her suggestion.

Harry giggles and scratches his nose against his index finger.

-

Harry doesn’t stay the night, he walks her up to her apartment door though. He kisses her chastley in front of her door and wraps an arm around her waist as he does so. He bids her a goodnight and a promise of seeing her soon.

They don’t see each other for a month. Both of them had been so blissful after the endorphins of kissing their person that they had forgotten that filming had wrapped. They weren’t set to work for a month. Harry texted her the next morning informing her that he’d be in England until filming resumed. She was still going to be in California, filming was moving back to Los Angeles, so she’d be back in her place there. Her family knew she was working, so they had sent her presents ahead to her place instead. Angie, her only true friend in the area, was spending her time with her actual family and Y/N didn’t want to intrude.

So the holidays were going to be spent alone. Those four weeks alone passed surprisingly quickly. She practiced techniques on herself, bought a tiny Christmas tree like the one in A Charlie Brown Christmas, watched A Charlie Brown Christmas and just about every other holiday movie possible. She fell in love with young Hugh Grant and Colin Firth for the thousandth time. She sang carols to herself and decorated her place with decorations from Target. She jammed out to the new Miley Cyrus album and held dance parties for herself in the house. She baked cookies and even attempted a trifle after watching a Great British Bake Off episode. She did and she did all in hopes that her mind wouldn’t wander to the guy who hadn’t called.

Harry texted occasionally, but it was infrequent at best. He was a busy person, she knew that. She knew who he was. And she didn’t want her mind to have enough time to feel sorry for herself. For her to think that she was just somebody to pass the time with while at work, because if she stopped doing things that’s where her mind would wander. Why did her mind spiral like it did? She had no idea, she’d always been like that.

His absence, their separation, made her question if her own feelings were even true. She wondered if when she saw him he would act as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t said their relationship was passionate and she had kissed him until she couldn’t breath.

Too much time alone, she needed some fresh air. On January 2nd, after an uneventful night at home and a lackluster countdown washed down with cheap champagne, she decided to go and walk around near her place. There was a coffee shop that wasn’t extremely expensive that she also liked that she figured she would get coffee from. After a brisk walk, she walked through the store's doors and ordered an iced green tea. As she waited, she watched the other customers around her, wishing to see a friendly face, someone she knew. And seconds later, she was met with half of that wish. Someone she knew, not necessarily a friendly face.

“Autumn.” She states with a grimace when someone taps her on the shoulder and she spins around.

“Y/N? It is you!” Autumn, one of the PA’s from Don’t Worry Darling who was especially in Harry’s business, exclaims overly happy as per usual.

Y/N bites the inside of her cheek and gives a tight lipped smile, trying her best to be cordial.

“How’s your holiday been!” Autumn asks.

“Great. You?”

“So great!” She’s quick to lean closer and say in a hushed tone, “But I miss working on set, especially getting to see that Harry everyday. He’s just so gorgeous.”

A breath gets stuck in Y/N’s chest at the mention of Harry’s name. Her brows can’t help but raise a bit at Autumn’s comment. Even lowering her voice didn’t make it feel alright to talk about Harry like this. He was her friend after all.

“Sure.” Y/N nods abruptly, realizing Autumn wants some recognition of what she’s just said. Y/N’s eyes glance around the room, hoping for an out like her drink is ready or something - no such luck.

“I mean,” Autumn keeps talking, of course, “You’re so lucky. You get to see him shirtless, like what? Everyday practically? Don’t tell me you don’t miss that just a little bit!”

“I miss working,” Y/N says, avoiding what Autumn is trying to get her to say. “And Harry’s my friend, could you maybe not talk about him like that with me?”

Autumn’s eyes widened in shock, her lips parted dumbfounded by her co-worker's response. Y/N’s name is called for her drink and she’s thankful for the serendipitous nature of that sound getting her out of the awkward situation she had just been in.

When she gets back to her apartment, she surprisingly has a text from Harry himself. She’s always telling everyone; speak of the devil and he will appear, in one way or another. It’s a Happy New Year well wish followed by a separate text asking how she was.

It was sent a minute ago so she decides to try and give him a call. She preferred talking on the phone over texting.

It rings a few times and then, again surprisingly, he picks up.  

“‘Lo?” His voice is nice and deep and sounding extra British after his weeks surrounded by family and such.

“Harry,” she sighs contentedly.

“Happy to hear your voice,” he says her name and she can tell he’s smiling just like she is, from ear to ear.

She bites at her lip, hearing him say her name.

“I’m well, thanks,” she says after a moment of happy silence.

“What?” Harry laughs, confused.

“You texted asking me how I was and I called to respond.”

“Got it,” Harry chuckles, and she hears him shuffling around, likely sitting down on something.

“How are you?” She continues.

“Good, starting to wind down for the day,” he lists off the things he’s been doing over the past few days. Some of it work related, some of it family activities. All of it fun, he insists. “What did you do today?” He finishes, knowing she was an avid activity doer based off of the snaps she had sent him over the past few weeks.

“Tidied my place, went to the coffee shop and got iced tea…” she tries to think and then she gasps, “Oh! And I saw Autumn, one of the Don’t Worry Darling PA’s -”

“The one who’s obsessed with me?”

“Exactly!” She laughs, “And I may have kind of told her off… accidentally.”

“Accidentally told her off?” Harry repeats, incredulous. “How’d you do that?”

“Well,” she doesn’t want to tell him the rest, but there’s also a tiny part of her that really does, “She was gushing about you, which, ew. And then she asked if I missed seeing you shirtless everyday.”

“Well do you miss seeing me shirtless?” Harry smirks.

“Oh shut up!” She’s quick to reply.

“So you do?”

“If I really wanted to see you shirtless, all I’d have to do is type in “Harry Styles sh” and it would come up,” she rolls her eyes even though she knows he can’t see them. “Wouldn’t even need the whole word. Guaranteed.”

“Uh-huh?” Harry questions still, “If you want me to send you shirtless pictures that the rest of the world hasn’t seen, Y/N, all you have to do is ask.”

“I do not want you to send me shirtless pictures of yourself!” She exclaims. She feels like jumping out of a window right now. This conversation had escalated so quickly and she felt herself flushing, maybe even perspiring a little bit. And she also knew that she also would probably like it if he sent her shirtless pictures, which made this whole thing worse.

“Offer stands,” he says, smug as he normally was, happy he got to banter with her again. It had been dull without her, if he was honest with himself. “If you ever find yourself in need, just send a cheeky text and I’ll whip one out for you, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

“See this sounds like you’re saying something sincere, but really you’re just telling me you’ll send me nudes at any time.”

“No one said anything about nudes!”

“Shirtless, nude, sounds like you’re getting too caught up in the details, hon.”

“No!” He protests, “You’re the one who’s supposed to be flustered right now, not me!”

“Aww, you’re flustered,” She coos.

Harry groans. “Whatever. I’ll be back on the 8th, be ready to go out on the 9th. I’m taking you on a proper date.”

“How do you know I’m going to say yes?” She bite her lip again, she’s really sweating now. She couldn’t believe he had just asked her out on a date out of nowhere. Out of them just joking about nudes. Maybe she didn’t know Harry as well as she thought.

“Because you called me,” he says confidently.

“I call everyone.”

“But I don’t offer shirtless pictures to everyone.”

“That has nothing to do with me saying yes to this date.”

“Or does it?”

She laughs at his words, at how his voice still manages to convey every facial expression and quirk of his lips. She knows there’s a smile on his lips as he stares in the distance, imagining her face just as she is his.

“Yes.” She smiles.

“Yes!” He repeats happily.

She hears him stand up and spin around possibly and she chuckles slightly, amused at the silly man across the world who had seemed to have stolen her heart.

“See you soon, Harry.”

“Not soon enough.”

-

On the Saturday of their date, Harry insists on picking her up. He meets her at her door and winks at her after pulling away from their short hug. He laces his hand in hers and she follows behind him as he all but drags her to his car that is downstairs. He seems giddy. His hair has grown out in the month he’s been gone and she knows they’ll cut it when filming resumes. He’s wearing Gucci flared blue jeans - she knows from the big logo on the bottom left pant leg - a ‘Waiting for Sunset’ graphic tee beneath a black cardigan with little animals and items knitted in it. And of course, his dirty ass vans. She had hoped that maybe Christmas would bring him a fresh pair from someone, but it seemed there was no such luck.

Either way, he looked good and upon scanning his outfit, she was pleased that she had dressed correctly for the occasion, knowing one of the sins of Los Angeles was being improperly dressed wherever you might go. Harry had said casual, but casual can always mean so many different things. She got it right with light wash high-waisted levi’s, a brown cream rib-knit long sleeve that buttoned like it could be a cardigan, and some fun chunky boots that added some height to her normal stature. She had contemplated between this and possibly twenty other tops and a few other bottoms. Landing on this felt right, plus it didn’t clash with Harry, the color of her shoes actually matched the color of the snake on the cardigan.

They both compliment each other on the way out to his car and she giggles when he stops and twirls her around. He says he didn’t get a “proper look” before for him to compliment her adequately. After the twirl, he nods and starts them off again, complimenting the specific pieces of her clothes and says she looks beautiful again. His giddiness was contagious.

“No Range tonight,” she muses when Harry stops them in front of a Mercedes-Benz cream convertible, top up.

“Not working,” he replies, unlocking the car with the key into the passenger’s side door handle.

She smiles and slides into the car and watches him jog around to his side and unlock it as well.

“Tonight is going to be fantastic,” he says, leaning over the console and kissing her cheek, just beside her lips.

And when he pulls away with that smug smile of his, she knows he kissed her there on purpose. But the little tease only makes her smile more. He was good at this. And he was right.

The night was fantastic. As was every night after. And she learned that Harry was so much more than anything she ever thought. She counted herself lucky to be loved by a man like him.

[unhealthyfanobsession]

Do you think you’ll continue with the lawyer Nessian fic. It was so amazingly written I’d love to read more! I love all your writing anyways I’ll be happy with anything❤️

Ok not *technically* a Drabble request BUT I’m not ready to commit to a full lawyer AU that happens in order however I did just drum up a part 2 that we’ll say is several years before the previous lawyer AU. Nessian teasing in a bar and Rhys being a dumbass.

FYI the lawyer Drabble I’m talking about can be found HERE.

“I’m in love,” Rhys slurred. Cassian, a decent bit bigger than his brother and two drinks behind him, had a gentle buzz so he could only surmise that his brother was well passed sober.

“Congratulations,” Cassian grinned, clapping his hand on Rhys’ shoulder. “May I lay eyes upon the future Mrs. Dumbass.”

Rhys stared at him flatly. Blew a laugh out of his nose. “She’s not marrying you, brother.”

Cassian snorted, casting his eyes around the elegantly decorated little lounge they’d stepped into for the night. Lounge, not bar. Because they were mature adults now looking to take the edge off after a long day of work, not college students looking to get fucked up.

It was different.

It was different because the cocktails cost $20 and were served in actual stemware instead of red solo cups. They were evolving. Growing. Cassian was a lawyer now and Rhys was supposed to be doing actual work for his dad’s company so… no more dive bars.

Now they frequented little lounges where accountants and lawyers and bankers sat in tailored suits and discussed… adult things.

It was all very civilized.

And yet here was his brother. Every bit the horny college student they were trying not to be. Oh well, old dogs and all that.

“End of the bar.” Rhys jerked his head to the left and Cassian grinned.

“Might be a little old for you, champ.”

Rhys wrinkled his brow and turned to look at the grandmother doing a crossword puzzle on the far left side of the bar. A martini glass in front of her. Good for grandma.

“Other end of the bar!”

Cassian smirked. He didn’t need to turn his head, since he’s noticed her the second she walked in, but he still did. Just so he could look some more.

“Ah, you mean the deliciously dishevelled leggy brunette with her suit jacket on the chair beside her who just ripped the pins out of her hair like they personally offended her and then laid them in a neat little pile beside her Kobo?

“Mmm,” Rhys grinned, “I’d like her to rip those fingers through my hair.”

Cassian rolled his eyes. “Go for it, brother.”

Rhys grinned wider. “I think I will.” He straightened up, ran a hair through his artfully mussed hair, and pulled on the lapels of his Gucci suit jacket until they were even again.

Cassian snickered into his Old Fashioned. Rhys could straighten his jacket all he wanted. He could pretend he wasn’t drunk all he wanted. It wouldn’t matter one bit.

Not with Nesta Archeron.

Nesta Archeron who hated men that stunk of trust funds and privilege more than anything else in this world.

This would be fun to watch.

Watch her try to ignore him at first. Eyes glued to the page of her book, hand reaching up to wave through the air like Rhys was an annoying fly she could swat away.

Rhys, to his credit, was a clever little bastard. He asked the bartender for a refill of her drink and set it down in front of her then sat himself one stool down from her.

He didn’t move her jacket to sit next to her, which would have had her going feral. He just sat there, waiting.

After a few moments Nesta let out an exacerbated sigh that Cassian could hear from across the room. There was his girl.

Well, not his girl. Not even a little bit his girl, but… someday.

Cassian decided that he was going to Marry Nesta Archeron the first time she kicked his ass up and down a negotiation meeting. It was a couple years ago now. He’d been young and new at his firm. She was young and new too, but the words learning curve were not in Nesta’s vocabulary. Everything she did, she did with perfection.

Including getting rid of men she didn’t want hitting on her.

She said something to his brother that made Rhys’ half drunk, cocky, smile fall halfway down his face.

Cassian would’ve given his left eye to know what she said in that moment. She had a knack for jumping at the jugular and Rhys… oh Rhys. So obvious.

After a few moments and the continual fall of Rhys’ face, Cassian decided it was time to intervene. He knocked his drink back and straightened out his own suit jacket. Armani, still overpriced and designer but not so obvious or try hard as Mr. Up On The Trends with his Gucci. Nesta appreciated classics.

Simple. Clean lines, solid colours, classic. Which was why it was so fun just how attracted she was to his half wild self.

Unlike Rhys, Cassian plucked Nesta’s light grey suit jacket up off the stool beside her and reached over her head to hang it on a coat hook at the end of the bar. Settling himself into the chair beside her like it was exactly where he belonged. Which it was.

She turned around with an indignant shriek and a fire-breathing snarl that narrowed into just a hard glare when she realized it was him. Touching.

“This guy giving you trouble, Nes?”

Rhys choked on his whiskey and Cassian fought his hardest to keep a straight face.

“I so don’t need your saviour complex right now, Cassian.” Nesta scoffed.

“No,” Rhys rolled his eyes. “She was doing perfectly well scaring off everyone in a 10 mile radius all on her own.”

Nesta smiled sweetly, “I was just playing your game.”

Rhys sputtered again. Looked up at his brother. “This devil woman that you apparently already know,” he glared, “is all yours. I’m going home.”

“Be sure to drink plenty of water!” Nesta sing songed after him. Rhys flipped them both off on his way out.

“What’d you say to him?”

Nesta smiled. A pretty, feline little thing. “He said he wanted to chat. Suggested 20 question, which is the lamest, oldest, crustiest line in the book. So I went first. Asked just how small his dick was that he felt the need to overcompensate with the swagger and the gratuitous displays of wealth. He thought he was quite clever to use his question to ask if I wanted to check for myself how not small his dick was and then I asked if his daddy never loved him and that’s where all of that machismo masking painfully obvious and deep seeded feelings of inadequacy and insecurity came from. I was going to offer him my friend’s number before you showed up. She’s an excellent therapist.”

Cassian laughed. Hard. For a very long time. He loved Rhys, but sometimes the kid could use a nice set down. It was always sweeter when delivered by a beautiful woman. Not to mention, Cassian himself had gotten the same ice cold rejection the first time he met Nesta. When he asked if she wanted to get a coffee and she looked at him like something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. That Rhys was chased off so easily just proved he couldn’t take the heat.

“You know the walking trust fund, I presume?” Nesta boredly sipped the drink Rhys had bought her. And even that was somehow amusing.

“Only for the last couple decades or so,” Cassian grinned. “He’s like a brother to me.”

“Explains a lot.”

“Your insults are more impactful when you clarify which person is being insulted.”

“I was going for the two birds one stone method.”

“In that case, consider me wounded, sweetheart.”

Nesta scoffed, “Unfortunately not mortally.”

“Oh Nesta, if I weren’t here you’d die of boredom and you know it. No one else can run you up and down the courtroom like I can.” Now. Cassian grinned as he watched the word flash across her eyes. He’d never live that first blunder down.

Nesta rose an eyebrow. “Bold of you to assume you present any challenge whatsoever.”

Cassian signalled for another drink and leaned forward. “Alright, I’ll bite. Who in this entire city can give you more of a run for your money?”

“Vanserra.” Nesta looked him dead in the eye. And managed to keep a straight face. As if that wasn’t the funniest fucking thing he’d heard all day.

“Oh yes, Nepotism and Nepotism LLP certainly has us all shaking in our boots,” Cassian blew out a breath. “What are you working on now?”

“I’m working on upholding attorney-client privilege.”

“So, the Suncurser merger.”

Nesta looked up. “How did you-”

“Helion and I are old friends. I checked the zoning on the lots he was buying before the merger went ahead to make sure the expansion was even feasible. But, as you know, M&A isn’t my thing. So I may have… given him a referral.”

“Are there any rich playboys in this city that you aren’t friends with?” Nesta finished off her drink and pointedly didn’t signal for another. “And if you think I’m going to be grateful to you for sending this my way you’ve got another thing-“

“Helion is my friend.” Cassian repeated, cutting her off. “He believes in this merger and he wants it done right. You’re the best, Nesta. Why wouldn’t I send him to you?”

“It’s not just to get in my pants?” She narrowed her eyes.

Cassian laughed again. “Oh no, sweetheart. When you invite me into your bed it will have nothing to do with work. It’ll be because you’re tired of denying how much you want me.” Cassian leaned in closer, one hand resting on the back of her chair. “Tired of denying the thrill that shoots through your whole body when we lay into each other. In the court room or out.” His nose brushed against hers, just a little, and Cassian felt Nesta tense up. He smirked, mouth just inches away from hers. “Tired of denying how right this is.”

Nesta’s voice was rough, husky. “So your plan is to wear me down?”

Cassian smirked. “My plan,” his hand came up to stroke the silk covered expanse of her upper arm, “is to marry you, Nesta Archeron. But sure, we can start with wearing you down.”

***Feyre and Nesta look physically similar so you can’t tell me drunk Rhys wouldn’t hit on Nesta in a bar before realizing he’d made a terrible mistake and running away thank you***

Also tags yourself, I’m the grandma doing the crossword puzzle with a martini. She’s an icon and she is the moment.

[wolfstar-in-color]

July Colorful Column: Remus is a Crip, and We Can Write Him Better.

There is one thing that can get me to close a fic so voraciously I don’t even make sure I’m not closing other essential tabs in the process. It doesn’t matter how much I’m loving the fic, how well written I think it is, or how desperately I want to know how it ends. Once I read this sentence, I am done.

It’s written in a variety of different ways, but it always goes something like this: “You don’t want me,” Remus said, “I am too sick/broken/poor/old/[insert chosen self-demeaning adjective here].”

You’re familiar with the trope. The trope is canonical. And if you’ve been around the wolfstar fandom for longer than a few minutes, you’ve read the trope. Maybe you love the trope! Maybe you’ve written the trope! Maybe you’re about to stop reading this column, because the trope rings true to you and you feel a little attacked!

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: I am not saying the trope is wrong. I am not saying it’s bad. I am not saying we should stop writing it. We all have things we don’t like to see in our chosen fics. Maybe you can’t stand Leather Jacket Motorbike Sirius? Maybe you think Elbow Patch Remus is overdone? Or maybe your pet peeves are based in something a little deeper - maybe you think Poor Latino Remus is an irresponsible depiction, or that PWPs are too reductive? Whatever it is, we all have our things.

Let me tell you about my thing. When I first became very ill several years ago, there were various low points in which I felt I had become inherently unlovable. This is, more or less, a normal reaction. When your body stops doing things it used to be able to do - or starts doing things you were quite alright without, thank you very much - it changes the way you relate to your body. You don’t want to hear my whole disability history, so yada yada yada, most people eventually come to accept their limitations. It’s a very painful existence, one in which you constantly tell yourself your disability has transformed you into a burdensome, unworthy member of society, and if nothing else, it’s not terribly sustainable. Being disabled takes grit! It takes power! It takes a truly absurd amount of medical self-advocacy! Hating yourself? Thinking yourself unworthy of love? No one has time for that. 

Of course, I’m being hyperbolic. Plenty of disabled people struggle with these feelings many years into their disabilities, and never really get over them. But here’s the thing. We experience those stories ALL THE TIME. Remember Rain Man? Or Million Dollar Baby? Or that one with the actress from Game of Thrones and that British actor who seemed like he was going to have a promising career but then didn't? Those are all stories about sad, bitter disabled people and their sad, bitter lives, two out of three of which end in the character completing suicide because they simply couldn’t imagine having to live as a disabled person. (I mean, come on media, I get that we're less likely to enjoy a leisurely Saturday hike, but our parking is SUBLIME.) When was the last time you engaged with media that depicted a happy disabled person? A complex disabled person? A disabled person who has sex? No really, these aren’t hypothetical questions, can you please drop a rec in the notes?? Because I am desperate.

There are lots of problems with this trope, and they’ve been discussed ad nauseam by people with PhDs. I’m not actually interested in talking about how this trope leads to a more prevalent societal idea that disabled people are unworthy of love, or contributes to the kind of political thought processes that keep disabled people purposefully disenfranchised. I’m just a bitch on Tumblr, and I have a bone to pick: the thing I really hate about the trope? It’s boring. I’m bored. You know how, like, halfway through Grey’s Anatomy you realized they were just recycling the same plot points over and over again and there was just no WAY anyone working at a hospital prone to THAT MANY disasters would stay on staff? It's like that. I love a recycled trope as much as the next person (There Was Only One Bed, anyone?). But I need. Something. Else.

Remus is disabled. BOLD claim. WILD speculation. Except, not really. You simply - no matter how you flip it, slice it, puree it, or deconstruct it - cannot tell me Remus Lupin is not disabled. Most of us, by this point, are probably familiar with the way that One Canonical Author intended One Dashing Werewolf to be “a metaphor for those illnesses that carry stigma, like HIV and AIDS” [I’m sorry to link you to an outside source quoting She Who Must Not Be Named, but we’re professionals here]. Which is... a thing. It’s been discussed. And, listen, there’s no denying that this parallel is a problematic interpretation of people who have HIV/AIDS and all such similar “those illnesses” (though I’ll admit that I, too, am perennially apt to turn into a raging beast liable to harm anything that crosses my path, but that’s more linked to the at-least-once-monthly recollection that One Day At A Time got cancelled). Critiques aside, Remus Lupin is a character who - due to a condition that affects him physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually - is repeatedly marginalized, oppressed, denied political and social power, and ostracized due to unfounded fear that he is infectious to others. Does that sound familiar?

We’re not going to argue about whether or not “Remus is canonically disabled as fuck” is a fair reading. And the reason we’re not going to argue about whether or not it’s a fair reading is because I haven’t read canon in 10-plus years and you will win the argument. Canon is only marginally relevant here. The icon of this blog is brown, curly haired Remus Lupin kissing his trans boyfriend, Sirius Black. We are obviously not too terribly invested in canon. The wolfstar fandom is now a community with over 25,000 AO3 fics, entire careers launched from drawing or writing or cosplaying this non-canonical pairing. We love to play around here with storylines and universes and races and genders and sexualities and all kinds of things, but most of the time? Remus is still disabled. He’s disabled as a werewolf in canon-compliant works, he’s disabled in the AUs where he was injured or abused or kidnapped or harmed as a child, he’s disabled in the stories that read him as chronically ill or bipolar or traumatized or blind or Deaf. I’d go so far as to say that he is one of very few characters in the Wide Wonderful World of media who is, in as close to his essence as one can be, always disabled. And that means? Don’t shoot the messenger... but we could stand to be a tiny bit more responsible with how we portray him. 

Disabled people are complicated. As much as I’d like to pretend we are always level-headed, confident, and ready to assert our inherent worth, we are still just humans. We have bad days. We doubt our worth. We sometimes go out with guys who complain about our steroid-induced weight gain (it was a long time ago, Tumblr, okay??). But, we also have joy and fun and good days and sex and happiness and families and so many other things. 

Remus is a disabled character, and as such, it’s only fair that he’d have those unworthy moments. But - I propose - Remus is also a crip. What is a crip? A crip - like a queer - is someone who eschews the limited boundaries placed on their bodies, who rejects a hierarchy of oppression in favor of an intersectional analysis of lived experience, who isn’t interested in being the tragic figure responsible for helping people with dominant identities realize how good they have it. Crips interpret their disabilities however they want, rethinking bodies and medicine and pleasure and pain and even time itself. Crips are political, community-minded, and in search of liberation. 

Remus is a character who struggles with his disability, sure. But he’s also a character who leverages his physical condition to attempt to shift communities towards his political leanings, advocates for the rights of those who share his physical condition, and has super hot sex with his wrongfully convicted boyfriend ultimately goes on to build community and family. Having a condition that quite literally cripples you, over which you have no control, and through which you are often read as a social pariah? That’s disability. But using said condition as a means through which to build advocacy and community? Now that’s some crip shit. 

Personally, I love disabled!Remus Lupin. But I love crip!Remus Lupin even more. I’d love to see more of a Remus who owns his disability, who covets what makes him unique, and who never ever again tells a potential romantic partner they are too good for him because of his disability. This trope - unlike There Was Only One Bed! - sometimes actually hurts to read. Where’s Remus who thinks a potential romantic partner isn’t good enough for him? Where’s Remus who insists his partners learn more about his condition in order to treat him properly? Where’s sexy wheelchair user Remus? Where’s Remus who uses his werewolf transformations as an excuse to travel the world? Where’s crip Remus??

We don’t have to put “you don’t want me” Remus entirely to bed. It is but one of many repeated tropes that are - in the words of The Hot Priest from Fleabag - morally a bit dubious. And let’s face it - we don’t always come to fandom for its moral superiority (as much as we sometimes like to think we do). 

This is not a condemnation - it is an invitation. Able-bodied folks are all but an injury, illness, or couple decades away from being disabled. And when you get here, I sincerely hope you don’t waste your time on “you don’t want me”ing back and forth with the people you love. I’m inviting you to come to the crip side now. We have snacks, and without all the “you don’t want me” talk, we get to the juicy parts much faster. 

Colorfully,

Mod Theo

[championashley]

Why the Spider Bro Hug is One of the MCU's Best Moments

Spider-Man: No Way Home has quite a lot of memorable moments/things. The reappearance of Tobey and Andrew, Green Goblin’s entire presence, Aunt May’s death, the fight between Peter 1 and Doctor Strange, the entire ending. But I think one of the smaller moments that I've barely heard anyone talk about online is the hug between the 3 Peters near the end. Out of all the moments in this movie that I remembered fondly, this one always leaped to the forefront of my mind even on my way home from the theater. In the grand scheme of all the world-altering nanners that happens in this movie, it feels really small, but there was just something about it that told me it wasn’t. Something about it just…connected with me, which is especially powerful considering I wasn’t really into superhero movies while Maguire and Garfield were donning the mask. It wasn’t until I thought about it that I finally realized how big that moment really was, and why I now consider it one of the best moments in the entire MCU.

Already the concept of this moment on paper to anyone not familiar with the idea of superheroes would seem downright ridiculous: a superhero getting a hug with alternate versions of himself from different universes, all of whom are played by the actors who originally portrayed them years ago. But it’s for the absurdity that elevates this moment because it follows what the MCU has done not just this year but throughout its tenure: finding humanity in absurdity. We just finished a year of Marvel media that dealt with the process of grief through the lens of decade era sitcoms (WandaVision), explored the concept of free Will and identity centered around a Norse god (Loki), and even discussed the values of humanity in a thousand-year journey focused on ostensibly alien robots (Eternals). Guardians of The Galaxy worked, for this reason, James Gunn managed to make a tree and raccoon into relatable, identifiable characters. At first glance, the MCU is the craziest absurd blueberries you’ll ever find in cinema and yet along with these premises comes a human touch. Finding something to say about the human condition, presented through a fantastical lens. The hug is a compacted representation of what the MCU has always done: finding humanity in absurdity. A universally recognized moment wrapped in a “what is going on?!” Blanket.

Another aspect of this hug that gets talked about often is how surreal it feels, and that I feel can be attributed to how impossible this moment would’ve looked like in the past. If I took a photo of that moment (obviously it’s a metaphor, please don’t use your phone in theaters especially then uploading said photos/videos to YouTube and indirectly spoiling thousands of people) and showed it to the community 6 years ago, no one would believe me, because this shouldn’t be possible. Getting both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield together in a movie with Tom Holland all portraying the same character is one of those wishes that just sounds like a pipe dream of a person from 2016. Even typing that out now feels impossible, I mean what possible entity could convince two actors who both hung up the mask many years ago to come back? Most likely a studio that has gained a reputation for pulling together prestigious actors and wild concepts into a Cinematic Universe that very consistently is able to create films that are not only crowd-pleasing but also offer up things to say about our world and the people in it. The MCU can make pipe dreams into reality, which like the absurdity has been something they’ve always done. They made the Avengers, Captain America, Ant-Man, Guardians of The Galaxy, and many others into pillars of fandom culture, with casts of actors that normally wouldn’t even dare touch this material, so it makes perfect sense that now would finally allow Jon Watts and the writers to bring the old guard in. This moment makes sense not only for the plot but where the MCU is now as a brand.

But along with the outside aspects, what really makes this moment stand tall among the best the MCU has to offer is the character work, not just for Peter 1 (Tom) but also being able to connect and in some ways continues the arcs/themes Peter 2 (Tobey) and 3 (Andrew) had in their own movies.

    -Peter 3: one of the lines that stuck with me even after walking out of the theater was "I always wanted brothers". Apart from being beyond adorable and soul-crushingly sad, it's critical to knowing the importance of this hug to him. One of the main storylines in Peter 3's movies was him discovering his parents’ past, to connect with a family unit he lost. This journey is so important to Peter 3’s character that our introduction to him in ASM1, is him as a child playing hide and seek with his father: playing out the dream of a normal family right before that dream is ripped away by his parents’ deaths. This theme of family is emphasized in that the moment Peter 3 adopts his superhero name is when saving a kid and returning him to his father, a reunion he never received. All Peter 3 wanted was a family, people to love him, understand him, and more importantly, help him through the hard moments in his life, specifically Gwen's death.

“Where’s my dad? He didn’t think it was his responsibility to be here to tell me this himself?!”

In No Way Home, Peter 3 gets all of that. He gets to interact with two individuals very similar to him, who help him move past his self-destructive, insecure mindset and give him the chance to redeem his biggest failure: not being able to save Gwen Stacy. Peter 3 finally found a family that he immediately wanted to and chose to protect. The little boy who lost his parents finally had two brothers to not only play with but help him get through his trauma without any judgment or expectations, despite ultimately having to say goodbye to them. Now knowing they’re out there may be enough to keep him going. 

“I love you guys!”

    -Peter 2: Peter 2 is the unique case out of the trio as he actually seemed to have his life pretty well put together. He's sorted things out with his MJ and is able to balance both being Peter Parker and Spider-Man. As such, he gets to be the rock of support for not only Peter 1 by stopping him from killing Green Goblin (symbolically saving both Norman and Harry) but 3 as well in giving him the self-esteem boost he desperately needed. Peter 2 is the supportive big brother because being so overwhelming selfless was baked into his identity by his Uncle Ben.

“I had a father. His name was Ben Parker.”

It’s why his “emo” phase in Spider-Man 3 was so jarring because due to the symbiote he started acting more selfish and egotistical. Ben's earnest values are so deeply ingrained into him that across his films he's the most mature and less quippy compared to his siblings. Even outside of the film universe, Peter 2 became Spider-Man first in terms of movie-release order and came of age in a time before the first iPhone came out, by proxy connecting him to an older generation than that of Peters 1 and 3. He came up first, thus the other two on a subconscious level look up to him like younger brothers normally would. He finally got to be the mentor, the Uncle Ben for the people that needed him, even though he got stabbed for it, but unlike Uncle Ben, he makes it through alive. 

    -Peter 1: Our Peter, the MCU version, has spent all of his appearances in some capacity being alone and trying to escape that. After being thrust into the world of catastrophe fighting Avengers in Civil War, Peter 1 spent all of Homecoming trying to get back to the position he was in, an environment where he was surrounded by people like him. 

“And, yeah I would love to play football. But I couldn’t then so I shouldn’t now.” “Right cause you’re different.” “Exactly. But I can’t tell anybody that..” 

“Thanks, Karen. It’s really nice to have someone to talk to.” 

In Far From Home, Peter 1 wanted to get away from the loneliness that Tony's death and his gift E.D.I.T.H placed on him.

“It’s really nice, to have somebody to talk to about this superhero stuff, you know?”

“No, I can’t.” “why not?” “because I have too much of a responsibility.” 

“Everywhere I go…I see his face. And the whole world is asking who’s gonna be the next Iron Man and…I don’t if that’s me, Happy. Im not Iron Man.”

and in No Way Home Peter 1 is even further isolated by Mysterio and society at large for something he didn't do. He had MJ, Ned, Aunt May, Happy, and Tony but all of them in some way couldn't entirely relate to Peter 1's problems. The only people he could relate to entirely were alternate versions of himself, people that know the pressures of living double lives and everyday crime-fighting. Peters 2 and 3 gave him a rare moment of sincere, complete understanding and love he had never had before because the only other superheroes he interacted with all faced bigger issues than himself. When they were together, Peter 1 didn’t need to worry about being equal or not being understood because they get it. It's no coincidence that at the end of the movie, Peter 1 makes a new suit that takes more inspiration from theirs than the ones made by Tony or with his tech. They became the new self-image he wanted to emulate, like a kid looking up to his older siblings. He's no longer the billionaire’s protégé, or the universe defending Avenger, but the friendly kid from Queens inspired by the example of his brothers. He may be alone now, but at least he now knows the feeling of being completely understood and accepted.

“I wanted you to know that-“ “Peter.” “You know. It’s what we do.” “…Yeah, it is what we do.”

On the subject of Peter 1, this moment also gives him the chance to relate to the audience in a way he didn’t before. Inevitably there are going to be viewers either in the theaters or watching from home who won’t know who Peter 2 and 3 are. The Raimi trilogy started almost 20 years ago while Webb’s duology started almost 10 years ago, and we’ve had a truckload of Superhero movies since then. If their only exposure to the world of superheroes is the MCU, obviously they’ll miss out on knowing these interpretations as intimately as others did going in. So like with the villains, Peter 1 gets to be an audience surrogate of sorts and gets to connect to older generations he only very recently became aware of. By getting that hug, Peter 1 (like the people in the audience) is embracing the past to carve out a better future, while Peter 2 and 3 are embracing the present they helped pave the way for. Peter 1 repeatedly saying “thank you” during the hug was about far more than just supporting him at his lowest moment. They laid the groundwork allowing him to soar, which again connects back to them being brothers. 

On top of everything, It's also such a heartwarmingly sincere moment of love and care from superheroes that very rarely allow it because all 3 Peters are constantly self-blocked by their selflessness. This was a private moment, and specifically for Peter 1, I couldn't help but think back to his and Tony's hug in Endgame because like that moment it’s much more freeing and supportive than all of the other hugs any of them have given/received. Peter 1's moment with Tony was important because it gave Tony a sense of closure and reassurance, after 5 years of holding to a dream of a safer future protected by Peter 1 by keeping the photo, and in this movie, it gave all 3 Spider-Men reassurance and closure. Peter 3 now has a family, Peter 2 now has a legacy, and Peter 1 now has a new self-image to hold himself to; and in this case, he willingly and enthusiastically seeks it rather than it being forced upon him: the first time he tried with Tony he mistook it for a hug and the second time he didn’t entirely comprehend the emotions behind it. He wanted that private moment of relief and love and he got it.

All in all, this moment I believe deserves to be recognized among the greatest the MCU has to offer due to the insane amount of depth supporting it. It’s a fantastic display of the MCU’s strengths, it’s a dream that many fans have wanted coming to life, it’s a culmination of multiple character arcs over 20 years, it’s a chance for some of the audience to connect with iterations of a character they love that they might not have known about, and it’s a beautiful moment of understanding and love that frankly after the past few years we all desperately needed, not just Peter. I think this moment should stand next to Avengers Assemble, Thor’s Led Zeppelin slaughter, Thor’s Wakanda Entrance, and Cap vs. Bucky as a moment we’re gonna be talking about for years. 

 EXTRA NOTES (things I went kick-flip bananas about the more I thought about them during writing this but had no place to put them)

Peter 3 being the first Spider-Man to show up after Aunt May dies is extremely clever because it was made clear in ASM2 that Spider-Man represents hope. “We have to be greater than what we suffer. My wish for you… is to become hope. People need that. And even if we fail, what better way is there to live?” Ned and MJ finding Peter 3 literally signals the audience that hope is returning to the story.

The final struggle against Green Goblin was all of them coming full circle. All 3 Peters one way or another lost or nearly lost someone to the flying menace: 2 nearly lost his MJ, his Aunt May, and even in death his relationship with Harry was subsequently destroyed and later lost him as well, 3 lost Gwen and his version of Harry to it. And 1 lost his Aunt May and nearly his MJ to it. 

The shadow of Green Goblin loomed over each of them, always there even when they didn’t know it. Which is why it’s so poignant that each in their own way brought down The Goblin: Peter 2 stops 1 from killing him in a very Palpatine/Darth Vader way, to keep him from being corrupted and losing all that he has left, a lesson he was imparting from his experience with Flint Marco. “Aunt May, he killed Uncle Ben.” “Uncle Ben meant the world to us. But he wouldn’t want us living one second, with revenge in our hearts. It’s like a poison, it can…take you over. Before you know it, turn you into something ugly.”

3 throws the antidote to 1 helping destroy the entity that took Gwen from him and like 2 is saving his Harry from The Goblin’s shadow, along with rescuing MJ from falling. He disassembled the trauma The Goblin left in his mind but also helped prevent it from corrupting anyone else. and 1 cures him, honoring Aunt May’s final wish and essentially avenging her death. Even the final act of Goblin, stabbing Peter 2 is rendered useless by him surviving. In killing “The Goblin” and avenging what they lost, all 3 Peters in a way became Avengers. 

[lokiondisneyplus]

A review of “Journey Into Mystery,” the penultimate Loki Season One episode on Disney+, coming up just as soon as I paper cut a giant cloud to death…

Journey Into Mystery was the title of the first Marvel comic to feature either Thor or Loki. It began as an anthology series featuring monsters and aliens, but Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Larry Lieber were so smitten with their adaptation of the characters of Norse myth that the Asgardians gradually took over the whole book, which was renamed after its hammer-wielding hero(*).

(*) The early Journey Into Mystery stories treated Thor’s alter ego, disabled Dr. Donald Blake, as the “real” character, while Thor was just someone Blake could magically transform into, while retaining his memories and personality. It wasn’t even clear whether Asgard itself was meant to exist at first, until Loki turned up on Earth in an early issue, caused trouble, and Blake/Thor somehow knew exactly how to get to Asgard to drop him off. Soon, the lines between Thor and Blake began to blur, and eventually Thor became the real guy, and Blake a fiction invented by Odin to humble his arrogant son. It’s a mark of just how instantly charismatic Loki was that the entire title quickly steered towards him and the other gods.

But once upon a time, anything was possible in Journey Into Mystery, which makes it an apt moniker for an absolutely wonderful episode of Loki where the same holds true. Our title characters are trapped in the Void, a place at the end of time where the TVA’s victims are banished to be devoured by a cloud monster named Alioth. And mostly they are surrounded by the wreckage of many dead timelines. Classic Loki insists that his group’s only goal is survival, and any kind of planning and scheming is doomed to kill the Loki who tries. But this ruined, hopeless world instead feels bursting with imagination and possibility.

There are the many Loki variants we see, with President Loki, among others, joining Classic, Kid, Boastful, and Alligator Loki. There are the metric ton of Easter Eggs just waiting to be screencapped by Marvel obsessives (I discuss a few of them down below), but which still suggest a much larger and weirder MCU even if you don’t immediately scream out “Is that… THROG?!?!?” at the appropriate moment. And all of that stuff is tons of fun, to be sure. But what makes this episode — and, increasingly, this series — feel so special is the way that it explores the untapped potential of Loki himself, in his many, many variations.

This is an episode that owes more than a small stylistic and thematic debt to Lost. It’s not just that Alioth looks and sounds so much like the Smoke Monster(*), that it makes a shared Wizard of Oz reference to “the man behind the curtain” (also the title of one of the very best Lost episodes), or even that the core group of Lokis are hiding in a bunker accessible via a hatch and a ladder that’s filled with recreational equipment (in this case, bowling alley lanes). It’s also that Loki, Sylvie, their counterparts, and Mobius have all been transported to a strange place that has disturbing echoes from their own lives, that operates according to strange new rules they have to learn while fleeing danger, and their presence there allows them to reflect on the many mistakes of their past and consider whether they want to, or can, transcend them.

(*) Yes, Alioth technically predates Smokey by a decade (see the notes below for more), but his look has been tweaked a bit here to seem more like smoke than a cloud, and the sounds he makes when he roars sound a lot like Smokey’s telltale taxi cab meter clicks. Given the other Lost hat tips in the episode, I have to believe Alioth was chosen specifically to evoke Smokey.

Classic Loki is aptly named. He wears the Sixties Jack Kirby costume, and he is a far more powerful magician than either Sylvie or our Loki have allowed themselves to be. He calls our Loki’s knives worthless compared to his sorcery, which feels like the show acknowledging that the movies depowered Loki a fair amount to make him seem cooler. But if Classic Loki can conjure up illusions bigger and more potent than his younger peers, he is a fundamentally weak and defeated man, convinced, like the others, that the only way to win the game into which he was born is not to play. “We cannot change,” he insists. “We’re broken. Every version of ourselves. Forever.” It is not only his sentiment — Kid Loki adds that any Loki who tries to improve inevitably winds up in the Void for their troubles — but it seems to have weighed on him longer and harder than most.

But Classic Loki takes inspiration from Loki and Sylvie to stand and fight rather than turn and run, magicking up a vision of their homeland to distract Alioth at a crucial moment in Sylvie’s plan, and getting eaten for his trouble. He was wrong: Lokis can change. (Though Kid Loki might once again argue that Classic Loki’s death is more evidence that the universe has no interest in any of them doing so.) And both Loki and Sylvie have been changing throughout their time together. Like most Lokis, they seem cursed to a life of loneliness. Sylvie learned as a child that a higher power believed she should not exist, and has spent a lifetime hiding out in places where any friends she might make will soon die in an apocalypse. Our Loki’s past isn’t quite so stark, but the knowledge that his birth father abandoned him, while his adoptive father never much liked him, have left permanent scars that govern a lot of his behavior. The defining element of Classic Loki’s backstory is that he spent a long time alone on a planet, and only got busted by the TVA when he attempted to reconnect with his brother and anyone else he once knew. This is a hard existence, for all of them. And while it does not forgive them their many sins(*), it helps contextualize them, and give them the knowledge to try to be better versions of themselves.

(*) Loki at one point even acknowledges that, for him, it’s probably only been a few days since he led an alien invasion of New York that left many dead, though due to TVA shenanigans, far more time may have passed.

For that matter, Mobius is not the stainless hero he once thought of himself as. While he and Sylvie are tooling around the Void in a pizza delivery car (because of course they are), he admits that he committed a lot of sins by believing that the ends justified the means, and was wrong. He doesn’t know who he is before the TVA stole and factory rebooted him, but he knows that he wants something better for himself and the universe, and takes the stolen TemPad to open up a portal to his own workplace in hopes of tearing down the TVA once and for all. Before he goes, though, he and Loki share a hug that feels a lot more poignant than it should, given that these characters have only spent parts of four episodes of TV together. It’s a testament to Hiddleston, Wilson, Waldron, and company (Tom Kauffman wrote this week’s script) that their friendship felt so alive and important in such a short amount of time.

The same can be said for Loki and Sylvie’s relationship, however we’re choosing to define it. Though they briefly cuddle together under a blanket that Loki conjures, they move no closer to romance than they were already. If anything, Mobius’ accusations of narcissism in last week’s episode seem to have made both of them pull back a bit from where they seemed to be heading back on Lamentis. But the connection between them is real, whatever exactly it is. And their ability to take down Alioth — to tap into the magic that Classic Loki always had, and to fulfill Loki’s belief that “I think we’re stronger than we realize” — by working together is inspiring and joyful. Without all this nuanced and engaging character work, Loki would still be an entertaining ride, but it’s the marriage of wild ideas with the human element that’s made it so great.

Of course, now comes the hard part. Endings have rarely been an MCU strength, give or take something like the climax of Endgame, and the finales of the two previous Disney+ shows were easily their weakest episodes. The strange, glorious, beautiful machine that Waldron and Herron have built doesn’t seem like it’s heading for another generic hero/villain slugfest, but then, neither did WandaVision before we got exactly that. This one feels different so far, though. The command of the story, the characters, and the tone are incredibly strong right now. There is a mystery to be solved about who is in the big castle beyond the Void (another Loki makes the most narrative and thematic sense to me, but we’ll see), and a lot to be resolved about what happens to the TVA and our heroes. And maybe there’s some heavy lifting that has to be done in service to the upcoming Dr. Strange or Ant-Man films.

It’s complicated, but on a show that has handled complexity well. Though even if the finale winds up keeping things simpler, that might work. As Loki notes while discussing his initial plan to take down Alioth, “Just because it’s not complicated doesn’t mean it’s bad.” Though as Kid Loki retorts, “It also doesn’t mean it’s good.”

Please be good, Loki finale. Everything up to this point deserves that.

Some other thoughts:

* Most of this week’s most interesting material happens in the Void. But the scenes back at the TVA clarify a few things. First, Ravonna is not the mastermind of all this, and she was very much suckered in by the Time-Keeper robots. But unlike Mobius or Hunter B-15, she’s so conditioned to the mission that even knowing it’s a lie hasn’t really swayed her from her mission. She has Miss Minutes (who herself is much craftier this week) looking into files about the creation of the TVA, but for the most part comes across as someone very happy with a status quo where she gets to be special and pass judgment on the rest of the multiverse.

* Alioth first appeared in 1993’s Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective, a miniseries (written by Mobius inspiration Mark Gruenwald, and with some extremely kewl Nineties art full of shoulder pads, studded collars, and the like) involving Ravonna, Kang, and the off-brand versions of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor (aka U.S. Agent, War Machine, and Thunderstrike, the latter of whom has yet to appear in the MCU). It’s a sequel to a Nineties crossover event called Citizen Kang. And no, I still don’t buy that Kang will be the one pulling the strings here, if only because it’s really bad storytelling for the big bad of the season to have never appeared or even been mentioned prior to the finale.

* Rather than try to identify every Easter egg visible in the Void’s terrain, I’ll instead highlight three of the most interesting. Right before the Lokis arrive at the hatch, we see a helicopter with Thanos’ name on it. This is a hat tip to an infamous — and often memed — out-of-continuity story where Thanos flies this chopper while trying to steal the Cosmic Cube (aka the Tesseract) from Hellcat. (A little kid gets his hands on it instead and, of course, uses the Cube to conjure up free ice cream.) James Gunn has been agitating for years for the Thanos Copter to be in the MCU. He finally got his wish.

* The other funny one: When the camera pans down the tunnel into Kid Loki’s headquarters, we see Mjolnir buried in the ground, and right below it is a jar containing a very annoyed frog in a Thor costume. This is either Thor himself — whom Loki cursed into amphibianhood in a memorable Walt Simonson storyline — or another character named Simon Walterston (note the backwards tribute to Walt) who later assumed the tiny mantle.

* Also, in one scene you can spot Yellowjacket’s helmet littering the landscape. This might support the theory that the TVA, the Void, etc., all exist in the Quantum Realm, since that’s where the MCU version of Yellowjacket probably went when his suit shorted out and he was crushed to subatomic size. Or it might be more trolling of the fanbase from the company that had WandaVision fans convinced that Mephisto, the X-Men, and/or Reed Richards would be appearing by the season finale.

* Honestly, I would have watched an entire episode that was just Loki, Mobius, and the others arguing about whether Alligator Loki was actually a Loki, or just a gator who ended up with the crown, presumably after eating a real Loki. The suggestion that the gator might be lying — and that this actually supports, rather than undermines, the case for him being a Loki — was just delightful. And hey, if Throg exists in the MCU now, why not Alligator Loki?

* Finally, the MCU films in general are not exactly known for their visual flair, though a few directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler have been able to craft distinctive images within the franchise’s usual template. Loki, though, is so often wonderful to look at, and particularly when our heroes are stuck in strange environments like Lamentis or the Void. Director Kate Herron and the VFX team work very well together to create dynamic and weird imagery like Sylvie running from Alioth, or the chaotic Loki battle in the bowling alley. Between this show and WandaVision, it appears the Disney+ corner of the MCU has a bit more room to expand its palette. (Falcon and the Winter Soldier, much less so.)

[daughterofluthien]

31 Days of Kenshiko, pt. 6

Prompt number: 6 - “Didn’t we already have this conversation?” Fandom: Teen Wolf Rating: T Warnings/Tags: Ken/Noshiko | preseries | angst with a happy ending | love confession Word Count: 591

“Didn’t we already have this conversation?” 

Her voice was calm—almost pointedly so—and Ken’s hands tightened around the back of the chair. He forced himself not to close his eyes in frustration.

“Look,” he said finally, after taking a deep breath, “we’ve been living together for a year now, and have been seeing each other—exclusively—for nearly four. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ask where you see this relationship going.”

“And I don’t see why it has to go anywhere.” Noshiko approached him slowly, as one might approach a wild animal, but she didn’t touch him, or move to take his hand.

He wanted her to.

He also didn’t want to cross that small barrier between them.

“I’ve had a wonderful time with you, Ken, shared more of myself with you than I have with anyone else in years. Decades, even.”

He thought about her—his Noshiko—lonely for decades, and his heart broke. He didn’t want her to be alone.

“I don’t have decades,” he said quietly, “not like you do. The time that we’ve been together? It’s been nearly a fifth of my life.” He paused, considered whether the next thing was worth saying, then said it anyways. “I don’t want us to be so wrapped up in the moment that we stop paying attention, and then next thing we know, you’ve passed me by.”

She shook her head, confused. “You’re still young, we have years before—”

“—no, you don’t—”

“—trust me, I do—”

“—Noshiko, I love you.”

Shit.

It was true, of course, had been true for awhile, but this wasn’t—

He still hadn’t entirely determined if this was just the equivalent of a child’s crush, and he was even less sure whether she would agree. After all, she must have been loved by many men and women over the years—what right did he have to think he was special?

At the very least, he didn’t want to tell her during an argument.

For her part, Noshiko stood very still, and he wondered what she was thinking. Wondered if she would tell him.

When she didn’t respond, he decided he needed to say something, try to fix this. “I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be.” She paused, but only briefly. “I don’t deserve it.”

“The apology, or…?”

“Your love.” She held herself rigidly straight, and he realized now that she was trying to keep her own emotions at bay. “Nine hundred years, and loving me has never led to any good ends.”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I do.” Her reply was quick, clipped. 

To hell with the barrier. He reached out for her hand, and she let him take it. “I’m pretty sure we’re only condemned to repeat history if we don’t remember it.”

She smiled then—the expression small, but fond—and quirked an eyebrow at him. “Some would call that naive.”

“And yet you’re not disagreeing.” A teasing tone had crept into the conversation, and he leaned into it, grateful for the shift.

“No. And—” she took a breath “—I’m willing to try.” 

“To try disagreeing with me?” He was mildly impressed by the speed of his own wit, and was rewarded when she laughed and pushed him away playfully.

He loved her laugh.

He loved her.

Noshiko held his gaze, and her eyes sobered and softened. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” He might not understand her past, might not know everything within it that shaped and molded her. But he knew what she was promising, and what it meant for her to say it. 

He smiled, gratefully. “Yeah, I do.”

[jimlingss]

O SHOOT REQUESTS !!! ill take my chances and ask for a zombie apocalypse or pirate au ft. hoseok 👀 i couldnt choose between the two aus and im hoseok biased but i can honestly see any member so do as who u see fit. i will not let my pairing/au choice limit the authors talent 😤 and i dont doubt anything from you will satisfy. and pshhh,, where are my manners. please and thank u! love u 💛

↳ Crocodile Tears

1.8k || 98% Fluff, 2% Angst || Jung Hoseok || Pirate!AU

“Look what I nabbed, Cap’n.”

Gunner Taehyung’s grinning with all teeth, a golden chain wrapped around his fingers that’s so shiny it’s blinding with the sunlight. Hoseok’s intrigued and flips the locket in his hand. It’s heavy with a wild rose engraved on the front and once he pops it open, there’s a faded painted portrait of a young woman inside.

“It’s a booty, eh? Caught if off milady right over ‘ere.”

Hoseok hums and narrows his eyes on the wrench tied in rope sitting amongst the captives. Your face is dirtied, hair drawn in a bun at your crown but with many strands fallen around your face. Your gown rat’s coloured, dull gray. You are entirely unremarkable. Like any other peasant.

But it’s not often captives have something of value on them.

“Bring her to my cabin.”

“Aye, aye.”

The ship sets sail again. Taehyung keeps the captives quiet with the threat of throwing them overboard while the cabin boy Jungkook swabs the poop deck. Helmsman Seokjin mans the helm with navigator Namjoon by his side. The ship’s heading to dock at Port Galigeo to get a pretty penny for all the loot and treasures they’ve gotten after four months’ voyage.

Once steep waters are reached and everything’s been taken care of, Hoseok resumes to his cabin. There, he finds you, sitting in the corner on the floorboards with tears in your eyes. You gasp as he enters and shuts the door.

“Please! Spare me!” you beg sorrowfully. “Let me go!”

“Why should I?” Hoseok tosses his hat onto his table and his coat to his rickety chair. You look so frightful, even when he’s still in his drawers and shirt, held together by the red sash.

He fiddles with the many golden rings across his fingers, a habit since he began his adventures, and he comes over to you. Hoseok’s boots are heavy against the floorboards, and he crouches down to meet your trembling eyes.

“I-I am just a peasant,” you sob. “I have nothing to give to you! My father is merely a farmer.”

“Oh? Then what be this here?” Hoseok dangles the priceless locket in front of you as the corner of his lip curls. It catches the light from the tiny window of the cabin and the gold gleams against your eyes, practically sparkling like a jewel. 

Your eyes flicker from it to him, hiccuping and frame quivering like a damn leaf. “It’s my grandmother’s. She left it for me before she passed.”

Hoseok hums a low note. “An’ if this be your grandmother’s, how she pay for such a treasure? Unless she been a thief.”

Your downcast head shakes. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

He pops the locket open before taking a good look at it. “This here be a portrait of you, isn’t it? You look different. Lavish. Like a noble’s daughter.”

“T-That isn’t me.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know.” 

There’s something rather pretty in the way tears drip down your cheeks, so soft and gentle like jewels of their own right. But Hoseok has seen many women, children and men cry. It’s nothing astonishing.

Hoseok smirks, a rush of air leaving his nose. “I’ve been cap’n of this ship for nearly a decade, dearest. I’ve held treasures you could only dream of, been in battles that nearly lost my leg, sailed ‘cross the seven seas with me mates. I know when a wrench lies.”

His eyes are narrowed in on yours. And Hoseok comes closer, hand lifting to grab a hold of your chin. But before he can, before he can blink or breathe — suddenly, you brandish a piece of glass against his exposed neck. 

The ropes around you clatter to the ground. Hoseok feels the sharp edge of the glass digging into his skin, a moment away from nicking him and drawing blood. But more notably, your eyes are aflame. Your expression is dark and you’re scowling at him. 

Gone is the fragile little girl weeping for mercy.

“Don’t come closer,” you warn in a low voice without a single tremble.

He leans back, but his gaze stays on yours. “You reckon you could kill me?”

“I wouldn’t hesitate.”

Hoseok’s mouth curls, grin stretching into his cheek. His interest is piqued. He knew there was more to you beneath the surface, and he’s happy you haven’t disappointed.

His hand latches onto your wrist to force your hand away. It's a battle of strength. One that he ultimately wins as the piece of glass goes clattering on the ground out of your reach. He sees it’s part of a broken bottle. But Hoseok’s much too put off guard and when your leg kicks out at him, he’s smacked square in the chin.

He grips it as he lands on his ass, sharply exhaling. But then he bursts into chuckles.

“You got some mean spirit in you, sweetheart.”

Unfortunately for you, Hoseok has far too much experience in combat and capture. Even if you try to kick, strike and even bite him, it’s not too difficult to get you tied into ropes again. Except this time, he makes sure to use his special knots and get you so wound up, no sharp edge could free you. 

“Let me go, bastard!”

“Settle down. You’re only gettin’ yourself riled.” Hoseok crouches in front of you again and comes to wipe away the stray tear on your cheek with the pad of his thumb. You angrily scowl at him, chest rising and falling. Crying won’t get you far now, not when he knows they’re just crocodile tears. “Don’t get yourself worried about someone hurtin’ you. Everyone on this ship swears by our code, me included.”

You scoff. “As if I’d trust a pirate.”

Hoseok smirks. “If I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve done so already. It isn’t pleasin’ for me to force a girl like yourself either. Not when I have plenty o’ gold to play with a wrench at the dock. Now I suggest you behave or my Quartermaster’ll throw you overboard.”

“Then do it!” you shout at him with your entire body, only to flop over to the floorboards.

He grips the knob of the door and looks over his shoulder. “No. You’re too much of a treasure, sweetheart.”

The sun is falling over the horizon when Namjoon approaches. “Everything go well with the girl?”

Hoseok hums and turns with a glint in his eye. “Tell all hands to keep her separate.”

Port Galigeo is reached within two days time. The waters are calm without storms and the stars are clear at night. The sailing is smooth and so the docks are reached faster than ever before.

The men aboard are eager to sell the loot, to spend a few days ashore, spend nights at the brothel and replenish the rum. As follows, their steps are quick and they move the crates of jewels and tools to the harbour. Seokjin also takes care of the captives, leading them in a straight line off the gangplank to be sold.

“Cap’n! What ‘bout the beauty ‘ere.” Taehyung points to you.

Hoseok meets your eyes and you’re seething, glaring back at him. The corner of his mouth curls in amusement.

“Leave her. Tell the lad to watch over her till we return.” He points to Jungkook and Taehyung nods with an ‘aye, aye’. 

Most of his crewmen take care of business, getting as much gold for the loot as possible. But Hoseok fiddles with your pendant in hand and heads to a jeweler. Said jeweler is an old man who quivers upon seeing him, Namjoon and Seokjin in his shop. He hides behind his table and cries, “Please! Spare me! Take what you must!”

Hoseok sighs. He doesn’t know why everyone thinks so badly of him. Maybe because he’s a pirate and he and his crew have pillaged countless. That’s fair, he supposes.

“Stop yer quivering,” Seokjin spews out, leaning against his table. “We need you to look at somethin’. Hurry before I steal your silver!”

Hoseok lifts your golden locket, letting it dangle from his hand. 

The old man eventually slinks out when he realizes they won’t do anything, and he takes out his magnifying glass. He motions for him to bring it forward and Hoseok does. The old man hums, studying the locket before flipping it over in his hand. His thumb brushes against the wild rose engraving.

“Where did you get this from?” he asks.

“Don’t matter,” Namjoon says curtly. 

Hoseok studies the man’s face and leans closer. “What is it?”

“It is a very valuable locket. I happen to recognize this symbol as well. It is the emblem of the Crochetta Kingdom.” He pops the locket open to the portrait of the young woman and looks up at Hoseok, clearing his throat. “I believe this locket belongs to the youngest princess of that kingdom. The runaway.”

Hoseok’s brow cocks.

The three of them leave in a hurry. 

Seokjin’s eyes are glazed as his mouth starts to spew how Lady Luck is truly on their side, how they’ll be able to get their hands on a high ransom or sell you for countless riches. Namjoon is perplexed at how a princess like you managed to get here when Crochetta was countries away.

But Hoseok remains quiet. He doesn’t plan to trade you. He doesn’t ask questions.

He is entirely and wholly intrigued. Like never before.

“Blimey, the ship!” There’s a shout at the docks and Hoseok is torn from his thoughts. Taehyung has his hands in the air, cursing aloud. And Hoseok’s eyes trail from him to his ship that’s off the dock and disappearing over the horizon. “It’s sailing away!”

Seokjin is aghast. “How?!”

“Who’s still on?!” Hoseok shouts, looking around the dock to all his shocked men and their mouths drawn open big enough to catch flies.

“That girl,” Namjoon says, looking at the captain.

Hoseok tied you tightly, he made sure of it. Unless you freed yourself again. But it’s not possible that you lifted the anchor. 

No. You must’ve cut the rope.

“Where’s Jungkook?”

At the same time, there’s a high-pitched shriek in the distance. All of the men are held to their spots on the docks as they watch a tiny figure in the horizon get pushed off the ship’s deck and then plopped into the waters. 

There’s a loud splash.

You stole the ship.

Hoseok is quiet when his men turn to him. They don’t dare utter a single word, far too afraid their captain is boiling with anger. But what frightens them far more is when Hoseok suddenly bursts out into chortling laughter.

He laughs and grins as he watches his ship sail into the distance.

You were truly a treasure hard to find. He knew it when he saw you.

And now, he’ll just have to catch you again.